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THE COLLEGE 

AND 
NEW AMERICA 



THE COLLEGE 

AND 

NEW AMERICA 



BY 

JAY WILLIAM HUDSON, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI 



FOREWORD 

BY 

HENEY SUZZALLO 

PRESIDENT OF TEE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 




D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YOEK LONDON 

1920 






COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



)C!. A 5. 7 17 6 2 



nUNTED VSJ THE trmTED STA1SS OF /kIfBBIC£ 

JUL 26 1920 



'V-' 15 I 



p^l 



i^ 



TO 

THE AMERICAlSr ASSOCIATION OP 
UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 

OR TO 

ANY OTHER GROUP OF MEN 

THAT WILL GET THESE THINGS DONE 



FOREWORD 

The Great War has had a revolutionary ef- 
fect on the minds of men. It has subjected both 
individuals and institutions to strains which 
Eave revealed, as no ordinary pressures can, 
defects in personal character and training and 
in social organization which immediately chal- 
lenge our intellectual attention. The effects wiU 
be far reaching; they will be good and lasting 
effects if causes and ideals are now analyzed 
so as to give sane direction to the reconstruc- 
tion of education and the civilization w^hich 
education serves. 

Among all the problems which we face none 
is more important than that of improving the 
institutional spirit and mechanism by which an 
educated American leadership is to emerge 
from the colleges and universities into the serv- 
ice of an aspiring and troubled world. The 
higher institutions have carried many splendid 
traditions, the products of centuries of trial and 
error. One after another they have been super- 

vu 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

imposed as insigM and necessity have deter- 
mined their coming. Often they have fallen 
into accidental relationships not thonght-deter- 
mined. Some ideals and methods fitted to a 
previons centnry^s needs carry an academic re.- 
spectability not consistent with the require- 
ments of onr own time. A new estimate of col- 
lege functions and their relations is required if 
education for leadership is to be a tidy and 
effective process. 

The university man has not had his traditions 
subjected to any such keen appraisal as that 
which fell upon the elementary school during 
the last part of the nineteenth century or that 
which now registers itself upon the secondary 
school. A rigid and thorough going appraisal 
of college and university is now due. In fact, 
it is overdue. There has been much current 
criticism of higher schools during the last ten 
years, both from lay and professional minds; 
but it has been partial in character and lacking 
in a fundamental point of view. A critique 
which is basic and thorough is welcome at this 
time when our academic minds are so com- 
pletely stirred that the profession is eager for 
rational assistance. Some reconstruction of the 

viii 



FOREWORD 

American college is coming. The wisdom of the 
immediate reconstruction depends upon the 
analysis of society's requirements of the insti- 
tution and upon an unbiased judgment of the 
worth of existing collegiate attitudes and pro- 
cesses. 

It mil be best for the institution itself if the 
coming reforms are born of internal impulse. 
Such an impulse will always be more sym- 
pathetic in spirit and better acquainted with 
the technology of teaching, than an impulse 
w^rought of the distrust of citizens outside our 
higher schools. The philisophers, who theoret- 
ically at least escape the limitations of spe- 
cialized college chairs, should know their insti- 
tutions as a whole. If they can know the so- 
ciety which surrounds them as well, they ought 
to be the academicians best equipped for the 
task of constructive criticism. 

The volume here presented is the work of one 
such professor of philosophy, academically 
broad and socially minded. With sympathy 
and justice he shows us our ancient institutional 
defects, notes accurately our civic obligations 
and sends us on our troubled but fruitful way 
filled with inspiring and constructive thought 

ix 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

No volume on higher education which has thus 
far appeared from the press is more stimulat- 
ing or useful than the one now offered. It 
should be read by every college teacher and ad- 
ministrator for it reveals the ineffectiveness of 
many of our sacred presuppositions and uncriti- 
cized academic ideals, and points the way to a 
better scheme of conscious values and deliber- 
ate practices, 

Hekry Suzzallo 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword vii 

I. The Call of the New Order 1 

II. The Academic Mind 10 

III. The Defense of the Academic Mind. . . 20 

IV. The Obligation to the Social Order. . . 34 
V. The Failure of the Academic Mind. ... 43 

VI. How College Professors Educate 50 

VII. America as an Educational Motive. ... 71 

VIII. The Truth Worth Teaching 83 

IX. Some Next Things in College Educa- 
tion 95 

X. The Meaning of America 118 

XI. The College and American Life 136 

XII. The Largest Terms of Culture 159 

XIIL How May These Things Be? 177 

Index 199 



XI 



THE COLLEGE 

AND 

NEW AMERICA 



THE CALL OF THE NEW ORDER 

For many years the rebuilding of civilization 
will not permit anything of human worth to 
go to waste. Already this applies to the ma- 
terial world; it must apply to the intellectual 
world as well. There will be little time for in- 
tellectual fooling; there will be great need for 
intellectual work. 

Now, the colleges have had a unique and im- 
portant part in the intellectual work of the 
world. Sometimes they have assumed the place 
of intellectual leadership. Not only have they 
helped to teach many of the most prominent 
leaders of men how to think, and even what to 
think, but many of those who have done the 
teaching have been themselves leaders of the 

1 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

first rank in tlie various achievements that we 
call civilization. 

During the World War, the colleges of Amer- 
ica were busied with adapting themselves to 
emergency conditions. Their function, their 
curricula, their pedagogy, their spirit, their 
attitude toward the world, were considerably 
changed. Never again will they be exactly what 
they were before the war, in any of these re- 
spects. For the emergencies of war begot the 
new emergencies of peace, whose demands are 
even more imperative and far more permanent. 

These demands are bom of the need of what 
we are pleased to call the social reconstruction 
of the world. There is no point in arguing for 
the necessity of it; the world has already begun 
it. There is great point in defining just what 
it means and what part the colleges must play 
in it. 

This social reconstruction calls upon the col- 
leges for two reasons ; first, because it requires 
skilled intelligence, and, second, because it re- 
quires skilled intelligence of a special sort. 

First, skilled intelligence. 

Any social order arises from, is sustained and 
refashioned by that vague but mighty thing 

2 



THE CALL OF THE NEW ORDER 

called public opinion. To achieve any sound 
and wide-spread reform, public opinion must be 
practically universal; it must be efficient; and 
it must be intelligent. Public opinion in a 
democracy may be efficient without the colleges ; 
it may become practically universal and united 
without them. But, without the colleges, it can- 
not be as intelligent as it would be with their 
conscientious participation and cooperative 
leadership. And if public opinion is not intel- 
ligent in the skilled construction of wise social 
purposes and in the expert means of attaining 
them, it is but the more unfortunate if it is uni- 
versal and efficient. Unintelligent efficiency is 
a sorry contradiction ; and it is quite prevalent. 

Second, skilled intelligence of a special sort. 

For the problems of social reconstruction are 
very special problems; problems, moreover, 
that happen to be the very life of men who teach 
and do their research in colleges. Most cer- 
tainly such problems, when carefully defined, 
become problems of modern scientific knowl- 
edge; particularly of the knowledge embraced 
within what v/e call the social sciences ; and it 
happens that the most conspicuous thinkers in 
the social sciences do their work within college 

3 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

walls. Most of the special journals for the 
skilled discussion of these sciences are edited by 
college teachers ; and college teachers make up 
the great majority of the contributors. And, 
for good or ill, most of the standard books on 
these subjects are produced by them. ... 

For instance, the issues of social reconstruc- 
tion are issues involving an intimate and ex- 
pert knowledge of economics and political 
science; and the experts in economics and po- 
litical science are quite largely educational 
experts. They are problems requiring a mas- 
tery of the facts and principles of sociology, of 
legal philosophy, of ethics, of history, of psy- 
chology; and, once more, most of the experts 
in these regions happen to be college professors, 
whose daily business is to train the American 
of to-morrow in just these things. 

The world cannot evade this fact. The col- 
leges must not. It is the call of the new world- 
order. 

Let us look forward a little. 

It is the immediate task of this book to define 
this new obligation of our American colleges 
to America and to the world, not only through 
their valuable contributions to knowledge, but 

4 



THE CALL OF THE NEW ORDER 

throngh their everyday edncation of American 
yonth. By ^^ colleges'^ is meant not only in- 
stitutions that go by that name, but also the 
collegiate divisions of our universities as dis- 
tinguished from their purely professional and 
technical schools, — ^^as Harvard College is dis- 
tinguished from Harvard University. And, 
primarily, we shall be driven to discuss the obli- 
gations of colleges as the obligations of college 
teachers themselves; for in their hands is 
placed the real guidance of the two great func- 
tions of the college, — the search for truth, on 
the one hand, and the imparting of truth on the 
other. Of course, a new world of obligation for 
them means a new world of obligation for the 
college administrator, as well as for the college 
student. 

In referring to the new order, it will be well 
for us to think, first of all, of the American 
order; and to appreciate that our problem is 
primarily one of social rather than physical 
reconstruction. Not because the college experts 
in the applied physical sciences have not a stu- 
pendous work to do for American life; but 
because all physical rebuilding must be, at the 
last, in terms of social aims, or it will be worth- 

5 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

less ; because the real meaning of a civilization 
is to be found in its social, not in its physical 
ideals; and because the fundamental responsi- 
bility of education is for the intangible purposes 
that make epochs, rather than for the matter 
of which they are made. 

To some, it may be a surprise to find that the 
first reform needed is the reform of the college 
professor himself, — of his attitude as a teacher 
toward his task and toward the world. The 
college professor has been sufficiently conscien- 
tious always, — ^but in a direction which has 
strangely ignored obligations the most vital of 
all. He has been nobly loyal to truth ; but he 
has not been sufficiently loyal to its social mean- 
ing and service. He has been a devotee of truth 
as the scholar sees it, which is good; but not 
as men need it and now in dire distress call 
for it. It is precisely in this attitude, which the 
college professor himself is beginning to sus- 
pect, that we shall find college education to be 
a failure, so far as it is a failure. 

To redeem the college from this relative fail- 
ure is the present business of educational 
reform. It means much constructive thinking 
that verges upon daring. Fundamentally, it 

6 



THE CALL OF THE NEW ORDEB 

means to come to a full consciousness of what 
we Americans really intend to make of the 
American order; and then to make this the 
supreme motive of our entire educational sys- 
tem, — even to the subordination of the old ideal 
of scholarship for its own sake ; yes, and of the 
almost irresistible tendency toward the newer 
ideal of vocationalism. The true ideal is larger 
than either of these, and includes both. Amer- 
ica herself, interpreted as a social order, and in 
living relation to world-culture, is yet to be 
evaluated as an adequate and inclusive educar 
tional motive. 

If the problem of defining America to herself 
prove to be a formidable one, educators must 
face this very problem sooner or later and keep 
facing it, if American education is to be made 
concretely and largely efficient. Otherwise, 
American education, already beginning to for- 
sake scholarship for mere materialistic effi- 
ciency, will become intrenched in irreversible 
decisions based upon the second-rate motives 
that are now clamoring for recognition. So we 
shall not evade this task of defining America 
to herself so far as this is necessary for edu- 
cational purposes^ In its bolder aspects, the 

7 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

problem will tnrn out to be not so difficult as 
it at first appears. But, difficult or easy, not 
only the college professor, but the enlightened 
public must speedily come to a mature realiza- 
tion that the chief obligation of education is to 
the American social order as it is and as we 
seek to make it. 

After adjusting the college professor and his 
college to this new sphere of obligation, we shall 
want to outline rather boldly the part whicH 
the American college is to take in the refashion- 
ing of the new order, especially as expressed in 
a new moral consciousness and a new national 
and international consciousness. We shall dis- 
cover a most interesting result of the discharge 
of this obligation, — a reaction upon the college 
itself that will profoundly transfigure its tra- 
ditional conceptions of truth. This, in turn, 
will mean a revised conception of education, 
toward which some events, whose real signi- 
ficance we have neglected, have yet been iner- 
rantly tending. 

The new America will not be the result of a 
revolution. It will be the old America come to 
the mature and proud consciousness of its 
ideals. So, the new education will be no over- 

8 



THE CALL OF THE NEW ORDER 

tumiiig of the old ; it will be the lusty fruition 
of what is, on the whole, the best educational 
system the world has known. 

Assuming, then, that the world has use for 
the colleges and their professors, how shall they 
proceed to their task? 



n 



THE ACADEMIC MIISTD 



As sooifr as one serionsly thinks of asking the 
college professor to take part in the practical 
(business of world-hnilding, one has second 
thoughts in the nature of misgivings. The col- 
lege professor is gifted with a mind learned in 
many things; it is, perhaps, a wholly willing 
mind ; it is a good mind, a very good mind in its 
place. But the world distrusts it, sometimes 
ridicules it, often caricatures it ; and ever deems 
it highly impractical and, all in all, useless for 
its sterner purposes. 

And, finally, the worldly-wise damn it by call- 
ing it the *^ academic mind.^* 

Just what do the worldly-wise mean by the 
academic mind, — ^the mind with which college 
professors are supposed to be afflicted? 

10 



THE ACADEMIC MIND 

In its modem and most virnlent form, it fe 
partly the resnlt of the specialization in learn- 
ing that has been going on increasingly dnring 
the last half century. Some of ns remember a 
time when a single professor taught physics, 
chemistry, geology, botany, and other scientific 
subjects under the license he held as a professor 
of science in general. To-day, there are no pro- 
fessors of science in general. Physics, chem- 
istry, and the other numerous subjects of scien- 
tific teaching are allotted to specialists in these 
several fields. A modem geologist may know 
little about chemistry; a physicist may know 
little or nothing about botany. This specializa- 
tion has taken place not only in the natural 
sciences, but in every other region of learning 
and research. 

All this is good, very good, so far as it goes. 
But note that out of it has emerged a by-pro- 
duct, known to our keener critics as the academic 
mind. And since these critics may be right, let 
us see exactly what it is. For the time, then, 
we may as well imagine ourselves allied with 
them, speaking freely as they speak, and with a 
measure of unsympathetic hostility. 

Not every college professor has the academic 

11 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

mind; and when he has it, he is nsnally con- 
scions of it as his' professional mind, qnite sep- 
arate from his everyday hnman living. He who 
has it tends to show at least some of the follow- 
ing alarming symptoms in varying degrees. 

First of all, he is absorbed in learning for 
learning's sake; and, for him, learning means 
Ms own special field. The natnral result of this 
is that he tends, gradually but surely, to ignore 
the relation of his subject to other subjects. He 
becomes, perforce, a provincial, not in the 
geography of space, but in the geography of 
interests. For instance, the larger educational 
problems of his college, such as curriculum- 
thinking and planning— for Which he is cooper- 
atively responsible — ^he is prone to leave to edu- 
cational administrators. He is, on the whole, 
somewhat indifferent to educational reforms, 
save as they molest his subject. Thus to ab- 
stract his subject from other subjects is deadly 
enough ; but he creates another abstraction far 
more significant, — the abstraction of his sub- 
ject from practical human needs. In this sense, 
lie is as dead to the world as any medieval 
brother of the cloisters. In assuming his vows 
to science instead of to religion, he has yet, in 

12 



THE ACADEMIC MIND 

effect, taken orders and has become not only 
an intellectual provincial, bnt an intellectnal 
monastic. He is, indeed, rather proud of this 
isolation from all ntilitarian considerations, 
spiritual and material, as though it were an 
achievement; and he dignifies it by calling it 
*Hhe scientific point of view.'^ 

The academically minded, thus comfortably 
circumscribed, yea, sacrosanct, burning the 
white flame of his devotion upon the altar of 
Ms Subject, is fortunate indeed if he does not 
attain some of the more arrant virtues of the 
pedant, even while crying anathema upon ped- 
antry in others. Not feeling social responsi- 
ibility very keenly, he tends to become self- 
centered. Daily face to face with that region 
of truth most worth while, he tends to achieve 
that most insidious of all humilities, the para- 
doxical humility of the self-complacent. For 
the monopolizing demands of his subject upon 
him gradually and imperceptibly breed in him 
like monopolizing demands upon others. In- 
deed, among his colleagues, he is sometimes 
discovered capable of the petty jealousies of the 
egotist. 

He is not an extremely good listener to men in 
. 13 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

other fields ; and when he listens to men in his 
own field, it is likely to be with an ever-growing 
refutation in his mind, — ^which begets a surpris- 
ing sort of mental deafness. As a conversa- 
tionalist, he would be astonished if he knew how 
often he uses the first personal pronoun. Se- 
cure in his field, but secure nowhere else, he 
tends to discuss most things, kings and lovers 
and gods, from its special vantage ; or he culti- 
vates an inbreeding silence that sometimes 
passes for depth; or surprises one with his 
child-like ignorance of the common experiences 
and attitudes of common men. 

Since a genuine sense of humor is born of a 
Eberal perspective, the academic mind is not 
unlikely to lack humor, save, occasionally, 
within its own restricted field; and then it is 
not much more convincing to other academic 
minds than the humor fond parents find in the 
unexampled achievements of their own unique 
offspring. Often when the academic mind ven- 
tures to laugh down ^^absurdities'^ lying beyond 
its own familiar region, the joke is on itself and 
its lack of acquaintance with detail gladly alien. 

When academic minds debate a serious prob- 
lem, they forthwith reduce it to abstractionSii 

14 



THE ACADEMIC MIND 

It transforms itself into what we are familiar 
with as a purely ^'^ academic question/' which 
gives rise to what we know as an ^^ academic dis- 
cussion." Such a discussion is not supposed 
to arrive anywhere in particular. Abstract 
ghost fights abstract ghost; phantom qualifica- 
tions thrust and parry with phantoms of their 
kind; definitions joust with definitions, until 
the opposing minds are wearied and retire with 
their unvanquished armies. Thus, the academic 
mind is more apt to debate what an abstraction 
called justice is than what is a just society of 
human beings, under definite and real condi- 
tions; more likely to talk about ideation and 
volition than about ideas and deeds. It defines 
hedonism, rather than the happy man ; freedom, 
rather than a free soul or a free state. It in- 
sists upon separating things that can be only 
distinguished, not separated, such as goodness 
and happiness ; and loves to talk about things 
*^as such,'' when there is nothing that exists 
in heaven or earth ^^as such/' 

As a natural result of its constant business of 
refined and accurate analysis, the academic 
mind tends to become almost painfully literal 
and empty of imagination. Considering the 

15 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

ideals for which it lives, the imagination is in 
the nature of a temptation to be resisted, — a 
siren that sednces from the straight and narrow 
way to the gates of trnth. Mnch, indeed, has 
been said in praise of the scientific imagination ; 
bnt it is the imagination of abstractions, not of 
images. Properly speaking, it is not imagina- 
tion at all ; it is logical constmction of concepts, 
an ability of a very high order. The academic 
mind dislikes metaphors and is suspicions of 
similes. It appreciates the flowers of literature 
only as it can dissect them. Now, in literature, 
as in any art, to dissect is to destroy. Thus, the 
academic mind, in teaching literature, tends to 
kill the dream and slay the dreamer. So lit- 
erary departments in colleges rarely stimulate 
creators ; the academic mind is there, to make 
academic minds of them. If these shall create, 
their most triumphant creation is not something 
new, unless it be a new analysis and evaluation 
of what is old. 

Discouraging the imagination as wayward, 
with a whole world of desires unexplored, the 
academic mind is apt to lack a certain healthy 
playfulness. Esteeming reason at the expense 
of imagination, valuing the true at the expense 

16 



THE ACADEMIC MIND 

of the beautiful, it is not unlikely to become tin- 
esthetic, even slovenly, in its modes of expres- 
sion, — its clothes, its manners, its walk, its 
speech. 

It is a matter of course that the habits of the 
academic mind should make it the creator of 
difficulties in the way of most reforms or 
policies of action. For by long training it is 
circumspect, with a pride of judicial minded- 
ness; conservative, with little of the spirit of 
adventure ; critical enough of the god of things 
as they are, but abundantly suspicious of any 
other god as an interloper. Vulgarly, the aca- 
demic mind never ^ ^ skids ^' or breaks the speed 
laws. To it, nothing is ever really ^^a matter 
of life and death. ' ^ 

Finally, having built its city upon the level 
plateau of reason, the academic mind shuns the 
heights and depths of feeling. It avoids incon- 
siderate enthusiasms ; and for it all enthusiasms 
tend to be inconsiderate, save the pale en- 
thusiasm for its subject, which is not communi- 
cable and which it is vulgar to attempt to com- 
municate. Emphatically, one must not be a 
propagandist. Enthusiasms are for the heart, 
not for the head; for the world, not for the 

11 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

scholar. The enthusiasms of to-day are the by- 
words of to-morrow ; but trnth lives forever. 

So the speech of the academic mind is never 
emotional, never fluent with the meltings of a 
divine fire. Indeed, to be fluent of speech is to 
be suspected of shallowness of thought. A very 
definite sort of academic speech has sprung up, 
fitted to the expression of the contents of the 
academic mind. Everyone who is acquainted 
with the oral discussions of us college pro- 
fessors knows it. It is halting; it retraces its 
steps and begins again ; it labors like Sisyphus 
with the burden of ^is concept ; it is filled with 
sundry * ^ as-it-weres, ^ ' ^ ^ be-that-as-it-may s, ' ^ 
and ^^howevers^' and mth many an *^ as-such^' 
and '4n-other-words'^ and *4n-a-sense'^; it is 
punctuated by frequent hesitating **uhs,'' as 
^'the theory-uh of the author-uh," impeding 
the march of words as the blind alleys of hell 
impede lost souls ; it is parenthetical with clog- 
ging qualifications and bracketed provisos; its 
commas are dashes, its periods tentative. The 
body of Caesar is dead ; and this Anthony has 
come, not to avenge Caesar, nay, not to bury 
him, but to dissect him. The academic mind 
would never die upon a cross; not because ii 

18 



THE ACADEMIC MIND 

would be unwilling, bnt becanse it could never 
inspire enough enthnsiasm to get the deed done. 

Such, it is malicionsly alleged, are some of 
the tendencies of the academic mind, — exempli- 
fied (it is fnrther alleged) at their very best 
in the average college faculty meeting, where 
the academic abstractness, literalness, conser- 
vatism, obstructionism, and mode of speech find 
a f ornm fully adapted to their glorified expres- 
sion. 

It is not to be expected that college profes- 
sors will accept this acconnt as true; but they 
may be grateful for it as a rough delineation of 
some of the characteristics of their colleagues. 
After all, the question is not whether it is a 
caricature, but whether it is a passable one. A 
caricature has its nses. Its pnrpose is selective 
emphasis — selective distortion, if yon please — 
of features that shall yet remain recognizable. 
Perhaps the above bold sketch is such a selec- 
tive distortion. If so, it mil serve to bring to 
forcible attention certain tendencies in the mind 
of the college teacher that must be kept before 
ns, if we are to define his function and the func- 
tion of his college in to-day's world. 



Ill 



THE DEFENSE OF THE ACADEMIC MIISTD 

But first, we college teachers, even thongh 
admitting a measure of trnth in onr hostile 
critics^ contentions, have the right to indulge in 
a word of protest and defense. 

Suppose it to be true that the academic mind 
(using the epithet of our critics) is a logical 
result of specialization in learning. Very well; 
is it not equally true that through this same 
specialization all our modern progress in knowl- 
edge has heen made? And it is inconceivable 
that this progress could have been made in any 
other way. To abolish the specialist is to abol- 
ish every modern science; for every modern 
science is a specialization. 

Let us go even further than our critics and 
maintain that many of the attributes alleged 
against us are not merely by-products of spe- 

20 



A DEFENSE OP THE ACADEmC MIND 

cialization, but are absolutely necessary that 
specialization may be efficient. Within the tasks 
which call for them, they are not vices to be con- 
demned, but virtues to be cultivated. Indeed, 
let us not only admit but insist that, as edu- 
cators, it is an important part of our business 
to produce these same traits in our students. 
We do this that the search for truth may go on 
under the only conditions that make the search 
successful. 

Let us make this clear. 

If we isolate our subject from other subjects, 
it is because we do not choose to be smatterers. 
If to keep within our proper province is to be 
*^ provincial,^' it is a provincialism highly worth 
while. To cross the boundary line and to dab- 
ble in other subjects seems to us dispersion of 
attention and useless presumption. We cannot 
be experts in a variety of fields. And the world 
needs experts. 

If we separate our special pursuits from all 
thoughts of utility, it is because our experience 
proves that truth is best served by seeking it 
for its own sake, no matter where it leads. 
Otherwise, the search for truth would tend to 
be merely prudential, and motived only by the 

21 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

iinmediate clamor of the times ; born of de- 
mands that are transitory and conflicting and 
partial, and nsually of the grosser sort. We 
seek the whole of truth, with the faith that all 
truth is worth while and that it will be of 
genuine use to our fellowmen sometime, if not 
at this moment. This is, we admit, ^Hhe scien- 
tific point of view/^ Kidicule it, if you desire. 
It takes courage to be loyal to it, unswayed by 
merely personal interests, or by the rewards of 
wealth or fame. If this is to be other-worldly 
and ^^monastic,^' we ask no man to take the 
TOWS of such a devotion unless he deems truth 
of enough value to sacrifice for it much that is 
human and pleasant. 

If we reduce all serious problems to what 
seem unreal and empty abstractions, we do it 
because it happens that no problem in heaven 
or earth can be solved, or even become an intel- 
ligible problem at all, without reducing it to 
abstractions, — ^yes, to distinctions which do not 
^xist as real separations in the concrete world. 
This means merely that no problem can be 
stated or solved without an analysis of it into 
parts, each part being neither more nor less 
than an abstracted part. 

22 



A DEFENSE OP THE ACADEMIC MIND 

Take the commonest everyday practical prob- 
lem, say tlie problem of furnishing wall-paper 
for a given wall. The problem at once reduces 
itself to the consideration of such unreal ele- 
ments as a plane surface, abstracted from three 
dimensions; length and breadth, abstracted 
from each other. For the moment, while 
measuring, one is simply compelled to consider 
the wall ^^as such,'' abstracted from its own 
thickness and from the ceiling and the floor; 
length ^*as such''; then breadth ^^as such," al- 
though we well know that there is no such thing 
in the world as a wall ^^as such," or length or 
breadth ^^as such." So with any other prob- 
lem involving geometry, — it deals with abstrac- 
tions and nothing but abstractions. And 
geometry — ^yes, all of mathematics — ^is valuable, 
not in spite of dealing with abstractions, but 
because it is able to do so and is loyal to the 
abstractions it makes. 

Again, if, during any conversation, I wish to 
determine whether my friend's argument is 
sound, I must, at once, abstract his reasons from 
his disposition, his temper, his manner of 
speech, and from my own affection for him and 
my like or dislike of his attitude toward me 

23 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

or toward his snbject. Then, as a logician, I 
mnst analyze his argument into its parts. In 
doing this, I am perfectly aware that there 
never was a train of reasoning ^^as snch,^^ apart 
from feelings; or terms, or premises, or con- 
clusions ^^as such/' So it is with any problem 
of logic; its tools are abstractions and nothing 
but abstractions. And logic is of worth not 
in spite of its abstractions, but precisely be- 
cause of them. 

Now, all the abstractions to which the acar 
demic mind reduces the world's problems are 
abstractions of exactly these ordinary and 
familiar sorts ; carried much further, it is true, 
as the problems become more intricate, but still 
not different in kind from what the man in the 
street creates every time he solves a problem. 
What begets the suspicion of the man in the 
street is not that the abstractions of the aca- 
demic mind are really different from his own in 
kind, but that they are so greatly refined that 
they seem empty, irrelevant, and unreal. 

But, after all, no abstraction seems unreal 
if one intimately realizes the problem to be 
solved by it. Then it is, for the moment, and 
rightfully, the supreme reality. As Eoyce puts 

24 



A DEFENSE OF THE ACADEMIC MIND 

it, ^*no distinction is ever too snbtle for you, 
at the moment when it occurs to you to make 
that distinction for yourself, and not merely 
to hear that somebody else has made it. And 
no abstraction seems to you too airy in the hour 
when you rise upon your own wings to the 
region where just that abstraction happens to 
be an element in the concrete fullness of your 
thoughtful life.'^* 

Do away with these so-called airy abstrao- 
tions, and you do away with not only mathe- 
matics and logic, but every one of the sciences. 
Chemistry deals with only one abstracted as- 
pect of our world, the chenoical aspect ; surely, 
everyone can see that no concrete object in the 
world about us is a merely chemical object. It 
is also an object for physics, for esthetics ; per- 
haps for geology; or for biology and anatomy 
and physiology; it may be for even sociology 
and psychology as well, — ^as, for instance, the 
chemist himself. The chemist ^s wife's tear has 
other meanings besides chemical meanings : yet, 
for this reason shall we consider chemistry 
worthless ? 

So with any other science. It not only ab- 

♦ Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. I, p. 8. 

25 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

stracts one single aspect of the world, or a small 
group of them, for its own attention, bnt, within 
this circmnscribed field, it makes further ab- 
Btractions. Otherwise, it would have no prob- 
lems, no experiments and no results. 

One should add that this power to think in 
terms of abstractions is of use not only in 
science. Even outside his science, this habit of 
the academic mind is valuable when brought to 
bear upon the great practical issues of the world 
at large. For, with the aid of its abstractions, 
the academic mind often is able to make im- 
portant discriminations that have practical 
value and which the unscientific mind ignores at 
the risk of injury to his cause. 

It is easy to conceive that the discussions of 
lis academic minds, including this very discus- 
sion, seem futile and even irritating to an ob- 
server. It is true that such discussions seldom 
arrive anywhere in particular. But, after all, 
we never expect to solve a real problem in the 
course of a conversation or even in a series of 
them. No, our problems are finally solved in 
the silent rigid tests of devious thought and 
crucial experiment. Our debates are leisurely 
exchanges of views, not hasty hunts for con- 

26 



A DEFENSE OP THE ACADEMIC MIND 

clnsions ; they are the thrusts and parries that 
clear up issues, rather than the decisive battles 
that settle them. 

And truly we do arrive somewhere in par- 
ticular, or all our faith in science is in vain. 

Does the academic mind seem ultra-conser- 
vative and obstructive 1 Well, ther^ was a time 
when the minds of men were not conservative^ 
not particularly circumspect in their search for 
truth; when they were uncritical of their 
methods, — dogmatic, credulous, makers of hasty 
generalizations. In those days, science made 
no progress worth recording. 

It was out of the realization of the hopeless 
futility of such uncritical procedure that mod- 
ern scientific method was bom. And the soul 
of modern scientific method is caution, — ^in- 
finitely patient caution. The modem scientific 
mind is, perforce, a conservative mind, a cir- 
cumsi>ect mind, a testing, sifting mind, sus- 
picious of new truths until they are proved ; and, 
for the sake of testing their pretensions, ready 
to put all negative arguments in their way, well 
knowing that if their claims to verity be well 
founded, they will emerge triumphant. In their 
triumph, no one will be gladder than the scien- 

27 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

tist ; for Ms challenge to pretended truths is not 
born of any enmity to change and progress, 
but of his concern for truth's sacred interests. 
No one wonld say that the sentry who cries 
^^Halt!'^ to an approaching soldier, even 
though that soldier later prove to be a friend, 
is thereby an enemy of the army he guards. 
The academic minds are, if you please, sentries 
at the outposts of truth. For the ordinary, 
everyday concerns of life, their professional 
caution would be indeed absurd. But for their 
special business it is necessary; and it would be 
a dereliction to forget it for one instant. The 
world trusts them to do this business for it 
conscientiously and well, and it quite implicitly 
accepts their announced results as authoritative. 

Conservative ? Obstructive ? Of scientific 
doubt was bom scientific thinking, whose very 
methods are the frank codifications of the laws 
t)f conservatism. And, since this scientific con- 
servatism came into being, science has pro- 
gressed farther than during all the preceding 
history of man's search for the meanings of 
Ms perplexing world. 

Again, to criticize the academic mind for its 
literalness, its lack of imagination, — ^is it not a 

28 



A DEFENSE OF THE ACADEMIC MIND 

little like blaming a carpenter for using a saw 
instead of a sword? Each is excellent in its 
place ; but let the soldier and the carpenter each 
have his own. Now, the special weapon of the 
truth-seeker is cold, hard, logical reason. It 
is constructive; but it is not the constructive 
imagination of the poet. The first law of mo- 
tion is dry and literal enough ; it would be hard 
to make a poem out of it; but neither can you 
extract the law of gravitation out of the divine 
afflatus of a poet, even though he be born in 
Henley Street. If it is an error to be literal, 
then truth itself is in error, for truth is always 
literal, — ^the literal truth. 

Yet it does sometimes happen that the imagi- 
nation comes upon the revelation of a great 
truth, boldly, grandly, and in a way that ever 
lives as a heroic episode. But such revelations 
are rare. They are accidental; and when they 
occur, they must be tested and put into form 
by the literal reason of the scientific mind, 
whose work is prosaic, but sure; to whom the 
sensuous imagination is not an aid, but a hin- 
drance. The service of truth by reason is as 
sacred as the service of beauty by the imagina- 
tion. The academic mind guesses that the two 

29 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

may be one service, when all is known; but lie 
knows that it is not the same service here and 
now. He is certain that, hard as it may be for 
his sonl, his is not the winding, woodland road, 
but the straight and stony trail that leads 
*Svhere no birds sing/' 

But what makes us academic minds seem most 
condemnable, unhuman, and uncompanionable 
to most men is that, as our critics allege, we 
tend to be somewhat aloof from the enthusiasms 
of the world about us. We are devoid of demon- 
strativeness, of feeling. We not only live the 
life of reason, but it is a reason barren of human 
emotions. 

We will have to admit that much of this is 
true ; and, we add, necessarily true, considering 
the nature of our tasks. Surely, you would not 
have us swayed by oun feelings in our search 
for truth? Come, now, shall our conclusions be 
determined by feelings of pleasure, or pain, or 
fear, or anger, or ambition? Shall we, for in- 
stance, believe only what makes us feel happy, 
and deny all that makes us feel unhappy? Shall 
we biologists come to you and say that the truth 
we bring you is not the result of reason and 
test and experiment, but was determined partly 

30 



A DEFENSE OF THE ACADEMIC MIND 

by onr feelings of delight or of dread? NTo, 
reason, to be serviceable, must indeed be calm 
and cold. One may, at times, attain truth 
through ^^ hunches''; but it is parlous to rely 
upon them. Strong feelings are as bad for the 
academic reason as a magnetic storm is for the 
traditional compass of the navigator. 

But, our critics may say, after your truth 
is once found, it might well arouse some human 
feeling in you. After it is safely proved, you 
might at least enunciate it with some enthu- 
siasm. After all, that is the main business of 
most of you college professors, — ^not to create 
new truth, but to communicate it to your stu- 
dents and to the world at large. But your tomes 
are dreary and your lectures uninspired. And 
your speech is, as we have said, halting, ten- 
tative, and often void of the commonest amen- 
ities of rhetoric. 

Well, it may be an unfortunate result of our 
training; but, at any rate, I suppose that we 
instinctively avoid any mode of speech that 
appears like propaganda, partly because we fear 
that it may seem a sort of immodest partisan- 
ship, a kind of special pleading for what our 
labors have produced; partly because we do 

31 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

not want to cheapen truth ; partly hecanse emo- 
tional speech wonld impede the calm judgment 
of those to whom we appeal, and whom we do 
not desire to sway, bnt to awake to jndicions 
thinking; and, finally, becanse we believe that 
worthy trath conveys itself to those who are 
worthy of it by its own force and merit, rather 
than by any nndne persnasion. If our speech 
is dijBScnlt and arid and unspectacular, so is the 
road each man must take to win the greater 
verities. Take our speech, if you will, as a sort 
of allegory of the devious and painstaking ways 
we ourselves had to tread to reach the treasures 
we now try to share with men. 

As for our other shortcomings, they are 
simply undesirable results of our occupation. 
We would like to mend them, as the sailor might 
like to mend his walk. We make fun of each 
other for just these shortcomings. We do not 
think that they interfere greatly with our main 
business. They simply make us the butt of 
ridicule for the more cosmopolitan man of the 
world, whom, we may as well confess, we often 
envy. 

This, then, is the defense of the academic 
mind. All the significant attributes condemned 

32 



A DEFENSE OF THE ACADEMIC MIND 

in it now stand revealed as not only pardonable 
but praiseworthy, if we bnt remember one car- 
dinal thing, — that its business in life is just the 
search for truth and its expression, — ^not the 
creation of the beautiful, not great passions, not 
heroic deeds. Its only passion is the passion for 
its search ; its only deeds are thoughts. 

The college teacher has been attacked; and 
the college teacher has been vindicated. What 
more is there to say? 

There is much more to say, if the American 
coUege is to adjust itself successfully to the 
new America. 



IV 



THE OBLIGATION TO THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The search for truth for its own sake has its 
honorable place in the world. For the college 
professor, it is an obligation. Let ns call it 
his Academic Obligation. If he is true to noth- 
ing else, he must be true to this. And he mnst 
keep his devotion to the truth of his science free 
from the world, unswerved by its utilitarian 
criticisms. There is and always will be an im- 
portant place in colleges for that kind of re- 
search which is in the service of science *^as 
such.'^ 

But the coUege professor is also a man among 
men. He is an intimate and very human unit 
of the living society of his time. Like other 
men, he eats and sleeps, marries, has children 
and a home, votes, pays his taxes, belongs to 

34: 



THE OBLIGATION TO THE SOCIAL OEDER 

clubs, plays golf, goes to church, and otherwise 
lives the normal life of the ordinary citizen. 
Within this human everyday world also, the 
college professor has duties which he does not 
hesitate to recognize. These are his Everyday 
Obligations. One need not enlarge upon thenL 
There is no question about them. 

Furthermore, just as, for the interests of his 
academic pursuits, he keeps them isolated from 
worldly concerns ; so, for the happiness of his 
wife and children and friends, as well as for 
his efficiency as a citizen, he would best not in- 
trude his academic points of view into his every- 
day life. The college professor becomes 
insufferable if he insists upon talking ^^shop^' 
there. It may be that this was a decisive reason 
why the Athenian public became weary of Soc- 
rates and why he did not get along weU with 
Xantippe. 

But shall the college professor recognize no 
relation at all between the region of his aca- 
demic interests and the world of his everyday 
life? Does the first contribute nothing to the 
second? 

It does. The contribution should be great and 
vital ; and it is one of the primary concerns of 

35 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

the college professor to see that the contribu- 
tion is made efficient. For there is a third 
sphere of obligation, npon the recognition of 
which depends the efficiency of the college, in 
its discharge of a distinct and nniqne dnty to 
civilization; particularly to the social recon- 
struction now so imperatively the call of the new 
world-order. In very fact, it is because of the 
attitude of the college professor toward this 
third sphere of obligation that the traditional 
criticisms of the academic mind arise and are 
richly deserved. 

Let us call this third sphere of obligation the 
Obligation to the Social Order. It is very im- 
portant to make clear at once what we shall 
mean by it, for it is the presupposition of all 
sound educational reform. And there is no 
better way than a way academic minds often 
adopt, — ^to hazard, first, a definition, and then 
to explain it. 

Here is the definition: 

By the Obligation to the Social Order is meant 
the obligation of academic experts to use their 
special knowledge to its utmost to solve the more 
pressing concrete social problems of the day, 
and to teach others to solve them. They are 

§6 



THE OBLIGATION TO THE SOCIAL ORDER 

to do this as a business, not as a side issue. 
They are to do it themselves. They are not to 
do it from their customary academic motives ; 
nor are they to test their results by merely aca- 
demic reasons. No, here their motives and 
tests must include the fundamental values men 
cherish as men and fight for as civilization. 
Applied to America, this means that the Amer- 
ican college exists for the American social order, 
first as a fact, but most as an ideal, with its in- 
ternational and intercultural implications. 

And now for an illustration of what the dis- 
charge of this obligation would mean : 

Suppose one happens to be a professor of 
philosophy. Academically, it is his business to 
be erudite in the philosophical systems of his- 
tory. He must know the typical philosophic 
problems and their typical solutions ; and (if he 
is either very young or very old) he will quite 
likely have constructed a philosophic system of 
his own. All this belongs to him as a seeker for 
truth as such. It is his Academic Obligation. 

His Everyday Obligations do not differ essen- 
tially from the everyday life of the average 
educated man. It is fairly distinct from hia 
academic interests. 

37 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

His ObKgation to tHe Social Order lie may or 
may not recognize. What can he achieve when 
he does recognize it efficiently? 

He can achieve many things. He can inter- 
pret the philosophical implications of the actual 
social order in which he lives, its popular atti- 
tudeSj acclaims, and decisions. There are such 
things as idealism, materialism, and mysticism 
not only in the philosophical systems he aca- 
demically teaches, but in the concrete life of the 
common men about him. Yes, that is the point. 
They are harder to find here; they are never 
pure, but they are intensely real, and it is just 
as significant to find them here, — ^more sig- 
nificant for the world of men he serves. Why? 
Because their sure social progress is to be ob- 
tained only by a thorough self -consciousness of 
what their own civilization really means. Such 
self-consciousness is the first condition of all 
rational human growth. The philosopher has 
something indispensable to contribute to it, or 
his theories are empty and his vision blind. 

Or, our same academic philosopher is an 
ethical theorist. Well, an ethical interpreta- 
iion of the times, say the recent war, or the 
American conscience, by one skillful with ethical 

38 



THE OBLIGATION TO THE SOCIAL OEDER 

concepts is the opportunity and manifest duty 
of those who can do it. The strictly academic 
business of the ethical theorist may be simply 
ethical theory. But in the world of events and 
as a teacher, he can and should apply and in- 
terpret sharply defined ideals, as a man expertly 
concerned with great issnes. Here, he mnst 
throw off, in a measnre, the academic limitations 
snrronnding him as a man of research. 

So with the psychologist, or the economist, or 
the sociologist, or the political scientist, or any 
other specialist; his learning has potential 
meanings in a very real obligation to the social 
order. 

Now, it shonld be made clear that the social 
order is not a matter of choice, or merely an 
inviting opportnnity for the academic mind ; it 
is exactly what we have called it, an obligation, 
—an obligation binding npon every college 
teacher who has vision for the real significance 
of both science and edncation. Science has 
larger responsibilities than those she owes to 
herself. "What civilization fights for is the ob- 
ject of no experimental laboratory. No army 
wonld die for a chemical f ormnla, or for a law 
of psychology. Yet, all social advance is aided 

39 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

through adaptations of just such knowledge; 
the more expert the knowledge, the surer the 
advance. And the special kind of knowledge 
indispensable for such progress is the knowl- 
edge in the possession of college and university 
scientists. 

Surely, as a human being, the admitted moral 
responsibilities of such a scientist reach to every 
phase of his power to achieve such service. To 
the limits of such power, he will seek to inter- 
pret and help set on the way of progress those 
regions of the concrete life of man and society 
to which his science, when considered ^^as such,'' 
only abstractly refers. He will ask what he, 
not as a pure scientist, but as a man who is also 
master of a science, can do for civilization. 

Without recognition of this obligation to so- 
ciety and the state (which make his researches 
possible) the professor and his college tend to 
become at least unmoral. Indeed, is it too 
harsh to say that a wilful blindness to the needs 
of his age and a cynical indifference to the prac- 
tical bearings of educational truth mean an 
overt breach of duty? 

But if the obligation to the social order never 
before made an imperative call upon scholars, 

40 



THE OBLIGATION TO THE SOCIAL ORDER 

it makes that call now, when social reconstrac- 
tion demands the ultimate resourcefnlness of 
every man. Even snch an abstract being as 
God came down to life with the war, through 
the new religions consciousness of all peoples. 
No academic question is so high and important 
at this time that it will absolve the conscience 
and the abilities of any man from responding 
to the pressing needs of the hour. 

Nor may the specialist in the social sciences 
continue to hand over these responsibilities to 
a special group of men other than themselves, 
— R special group of ^^ applied'^ social scientists. 
If the body of knowledge embraced in the social 
sciences is to be rendered most of value to the 
world of concrete life, the experts themselves 
are best equipped to transform it into that 
value. Only the academic mind knows enough 
to put its abstractions together again! Grave 
problems affecting the whole structure of so- 
ciety have been left to others than the experts 
before. The result has frequently been a mis- 
interpretation of science's true pronounce- 
ments on the subjects involved, often delay, and 
sometimes downright catastrophe. Another 
reason is just as important. It has been already 

41 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

hinted that the recognition of his obligations 
to the social order by the scientist himself 
means a revision of his notion of edncational 
tmthj and so of his attitude toward his snbject; 
above all, a new view of college education and 
of his part in it. So, not only does the social 
order need the academic mind, but the academic 
mind, in turn, needs the social order for the 
tremendous value of its reaction upon the col- 
lege of to-morrow. 

This, then, is the Obligation to the Social 
Order. The college professor must recognize 
it in two ways, — ^first, by grappling with its 
problems himself; and second, by teaching 
American youth to grapple with them. The sec- 
ond way is just as important as the first. For 
it is the supreme business of the college to 
achieve this very thing. Otherwise, it ims 
finally closed its gates ou life^ 



THE FATLTTRE OF THE ACADEMIC MINT) 

But in all this is there anything new? Has 
not the scientist long recognized the obligations 
of himself and of his science to the problems of 
the world at large? Is not the increasing pres- 
tige of the vocational sciences in education and 
in life snfiScient evidence of this? Further, the 
experts of the college are found more and more 
in public life. They hold important public 
offices; are heard of on public commissions, in 
organized movements for civic and social bet- 
terment. We have all kinds of applied psy- 
chology, from educational psychology to the 
psychology of advertising and salesmanship. 
The journals of political science, economics, and 
sociology present not a few articles by college 
professors on vital problems of the day, as their 
subjects touch them. 

43 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

In answer to this, it is pertinent to say, first 
of all, that we are not here concerned with 
whether the applied or vocational sciences are 
discharging their obligations to civilization. 
On the whole, they are. They are, in their very 
natnre, in close contact with concrete life. But 
their work is only secondarily that of social re- 
construction. It is with the social sciences that 
we are here concerned, and with the strictly 
educational uses of the pure physical sciences. 
And first, it should be made clear that while a 
conspicuous few teachers of such sciences do 
recognize the obligation to the social order, the 
great majority do not; or they do not recognize 
it sufficiently, and as a primary moral responsi- 
bility. That the living application of the social 
sciences should be behind that of the physical 
sciences is partly because the spiritual needs of 
men are not so clamorous or so innnediately 
pressing as the material needs that the physical 
sciences serve ; partly because of the elusiveness 
and complexity of the problems involved ; partly 
because the social sciences conceive themselves 
less advanced and more tentative in their con- 
clusions. But whatever the reason, when the 
social sciences do assume the obligation to the 

44 



THE FAILURE OF THE ACADEMIC MIND 

social order, they tend to do so in a haphazard 
way, and without full consciousness of its im- 
port. And the pure physical sciences, as such, 
rarely perceive such an obligation at all. 

What is most serious is that, when the scien- 
tist does assume world-obligations, he tends to 
do so as an academic mind. He insists upon 
carrying his beloved abstractions into that 
sphere as though they were realities. He tends, 
thus, not only to nullify his efforts, but to do 
positive injury to the causes he seeks to serve. 
If, within the uses of its own realm, the criti- 
cisms of the academic mind were captious and 
the result of misapprehension, here, in the 
region of its obligations to the social order, 
they are abundantly justified. 

For the supreme fallacy of the academic mind 
is carefully to make abstractions; and then, 
straightway, to forget that they are abstrac- 
tions. The fault is not to think academically; 
but to think academically and not to know it. 
Many natural scientists seem thoroughly un- 
aware that, in dealing with abstracted aspects of 
reality, they are dealing with the intangible and 
the unreal. The social scientist often commits 
the same fallacy. 

45 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

For instance, academically, it is perfectly 
correct, because logical, for a philosopher to 
classify people into those who are pleasure- 
seekers and those who do right for right ^s sake, 
and so on ; or, for a political scientist to classify 
governments as democra<^ies, antocracies, and 
the like. But real people are never mere pleas- 
nre-seekers; nor doea a concrete person, John 
Smith, always do right for right ^s sake. Neither 
is any given government a democracy, snngly 
fitting within any logical definition one can con- 
ceive, — ^whatever its ideals may be. Yet, it is 
the tendency of the academic mind to treat 
actual people and governments and other en- 
tities of our real world as if they were just these 
sorts of other-worldly things. 

But no concrete problem can be advanta- 
geously interpreted or solved on this basis. The 
academic mind will surely fail if it attempts it. 
All that it will succeed in doing is to solve the 
problems of a hypothetical world that never 
was and that never can be ; or to glean new ab- 
stractions ; or, at best, illustrations of them, to 
put into new theses that shall appear as new 
products of academic research. 

Or, to give another instance of what is very 
46 



THE FAILURE OF THE ACADEMIC MIND 

conunon and stiU more specious: The expert 
in the conceptions belonging to one field of 
knowledge legitimately solves the problems of 
that field in their terms. But sometimes he for- 
gets that these are very special and limited 
notions of truth, applicable only to that one 
field. He ignores that his science is only one 
abstracted aspect of concrete life, separated 
from other aspects of life only for the sake of 
the specialization of labor. Ignoring this, he at- 
tempts to solve the problems of other fields with 
his own field's special concepts. Thus, a biolo- 
gist sometimes endeavors to reduce all psy- 
chology to biological concepts ; or an economist 
to reduce all moral values to the special values 
of the economic world. This tendency is at its 
extreme when, as is often the case, a scientist 
essays to solve all concrete world-problems in 
terms of his own abstracted science ; as when a 
Spencer applies the principles of biological 
evolution to the inorganic and spiritual worlds, 
not metaphorically, but literally. Or, when a 
Haeckel solves the riddle of the universe, in- 
cluding God, the soul, and immortality, by the 
notions of biology. This can be done so adroitly 
that the world, unfamiliar with the meaning 

47 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

and limitations of the ideas nsed, may be tem- 
porarily convinced. It is in this way that the 
defects of the academic mind frequently have 
permeated the world order, under the honest 
pretension of giving mankind a new enlighten- 
ment. But if the excursion of the academic 
mind has been into the realm of the more com- 
mon concerns of life, the result is such that 
the worldly-wise find in it only one more in- 
stance of the inefficiency of the academically 
minded in general, and of the college professor 
in particular. 

It is this trait of carrying his abstractions, 
unchanged, into the world of events that gives 
rise to most of the criticisms of the academic 
mind as impractical, provincial, other-worldly, 
unimaginative, and, on the whole, inefficient, 
when outside its own restricted sphere. It is 
this infirmity that begets the stage version of 
the long-haired, helpless college professor, with 
his abundant naivete and childlike unsophisti- 
cation. It is the meaning of the distrust which 
many people had of ^^ Professor '' Wilson at the 
beginning of his administration as President 
of the United States; and which he had to live 
down by practical successes in dealing with 

48 



THE FAILUEE OF THE ACADEmC MIND 

practical issues ; and by proving that lie was a 
hnman being after all, witb a vision larger than 
that of the mere college professor. I hope to 
show that it is this defect of the academic mind 
which is at the bottom of nearly all of the 
typical shortcomings of college education to- 
day. It is the secret of the inefficiency of many 
of our college graduates, who must be unaca- 
demicized in some measure before they can 
accomplish much in meeting real problems with 
their recently acquired learning. 

Let us next look at college education as the 
academic mind achieves it. 



VI 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

The failure of the acmdemic mind is the fail- 
ure of college education. College education 
should be conceived to be primarily an obliga- 
tion to the social order; the college teacher 
thinks of it as part of his merely academic obli- 
gation. His educational use of the social 
sciences is academic; of the physical sciences 
is academic ; of languages and literatures is aca- 
demic. It is much nearer his function of re- 
search than the function of fitting for life; 
nearer the purpose of creating more academic 
specialists than the purpose of creating efficient 
citizens, — ^yet, paradoxically enough, attaining 
neither ! 

Let us see if this is so. Let us see how the 
traits of the academic mind, invaluable for the 

50 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

research type of truth, are yet intruded into 
the edncational uses of learning; how, through 
such nses, these traits transform themselves 
into faults, and attain a product quite anoma- 
lous. 

Try to understand this product fairly, — the 
mind of the typical college graduate, approved 
and sealed with a typical bachelor's degree. 
What has he learned? Some of the elements of 
the social sciences, most probably, history and 
economics ; some foreign languages, with an em- 
phasis upon the modern; some physical 
sciences, chiefly chosen from physics, chemistry, 
and zoology; some English composition and 
literature ; some mathematics ; and a few other 
scattered subjects. The relative stress upon 
these general fields is likely to be in the order 
in which I have mentioned them. Probably 
the western college graduate has had more of 
the natural sciences and less of the languages 
than the eastern. But, taking it all in all, col- 
lege men all over America emerge with suffi- 
ciently similar acquisitions in learning, and 
even culture. One may discuss them fairly as 
a common type, with very definite common 
traits. 

51 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

The wortli of jnst these subjects and their 
relative emphasis must be appraised. But it is 
important to discover not merely what subjects 
our graduate has studied, but in what sense he 
has studied them; not merely what he has 
learned, but his attitude toward that learning; 
and, further, the kinds of uses he tends to make 
of it. The answer spells culture or the reverse ; 
it means wisdom or folly. For, as everyone 
knows, culture is not the mere learning of high 
things, but the passion for them; and wisdom 
is not knowledge, but knowledge transfigured 
by life and for life. Education is either both, 
or it is — academic. 

It is academic. During his four years, our 
college graduate learns the two great abstrac- 
tions of his teachers : the abstraction of schol- 
arly interests from each other ; and the abstrac- 
tion of scholarly interests from life. No 
complaint would be in order if this were merely 
one stage in his education. For it is a neces- 
sary step in all learning; analysis precedes in- 
telligent synthesis. One must first take the 
watch apart before he can learn to put it to- 
gether. But what if abstract analysis culminate 
in nothing further? What if the sundered sides 

52 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

of reality represented by the various special 
sciences never get put together again in the 
student ^s mind? What if, say, economics on the 
one hand and ethics on the other; or political 
science and sociology; or the humanities and 
the physical sciences, — ^what if these are sepa- 
rated not only tentatively, for temporary con- 
venience and efficiency, but are never reunited, 
as life insists that they shall be united? 

But that is exactly what happens. 

Even within a special group of sciences of 
the same kind, the sundering continues without 
end. For example, the student studies the vari- 
ous social sciences. Presumably, these are 
sciences about a very concrete thing called 
Society. But where and when does the student 
learn of that living Society, of which each social 
science presents only one limited aspect? True, 
he learns of the economic side of society; of 
the sociological side, the political side, the 
ethical side; but rarely of that Society which 
is all of these things, and so no one of just 
these things alone. This is no more education 
than an unorganized miscellany of vital organs 
would be a living body. For the real prob- 
lems -and issues of Society, the things men fight 

53 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

for as democracy, are never merely economic, 
or anthropological, or political, or ethical. 
They are the human syntheses of all these par- 
tial things. Is there no place in colleges for 
these problems? When do social scientists get 
together to correlate their functions and re- 
sults? To what would they be correlated, if 
they did meet? 

Even languages are likely to be taught **as 
such,'' are certainly given credit for as such; 
not as leading to the mastery of the articulate 
thought to which the languages are the means, 
or even to philological uses, save the most 
casual A language abstracted from its litera- 
ture ! Or from the power to speak it ! Or, to 
understand it when it is spoken! But it is so 
many units toward a degree! Or suppose the 
literature is taught, how is it likely to be 
taught? Again the tendency toward iafinite 
analysis without the infinite synthesis. Is it 
our very own literature? Hamlet? The stu- 
dent is likely to get the style in which Hamlet 
is written; the sources of Hamlet; the drama- 
turgy of Hamlet ; the historical setting of Ham- 
let; the grammar of Hamlet; the etymology of 
Hamlet; but rarely Hamlet himself, rarely the 

54 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

divine contagion. Many teachers wonld deny 
that there is any snch thing. 

The encouraging fact is that in the depart- 
ment of English in most of onr larger colleges 
there is likely to be at least one man who sees 
this and regrets it. 

All conceivable ways and means in the hands 
of modern education tend to make this ana- 
lytic stage in learning the goal of learning; to 
make the merely tentative the final ; to make the 
imreal the real. The necessary narrow spe- 
cialization of teachers helps it. Stressing the 
conditions of graduation as a mere amassing 
of credit for a certain number of hours spent in 
the class-room helps it. Our tests of the pro- 
ficiency of the student help it, — ^tests that come 
immediately after each course he takes, as just 
this special course, which may safely be for- 
gotten now that the grade is finally recorded; 
tests that never hold the student to an intel- 
ligent organization of the fields of learning in 
relation to one another. Our strange lack of 
special correlation courses aids it, — courses 
that could be invented to bring together, for 
perspective's sake, the various special and nar- 
row fields of learning which the student is ex- 

55 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

ploring. The elective system tends to foster 
this same unreal education. And it is encour- 
aged by the loose interpretation of most 
^^gronp systems/^ notwithstanding that they 
are supposed to ameliorate the evils of too 
much freedom in the choice of studies. Finally, 
the absolute consonance of this notion of edu- 
cation with the professional interests of the col- 
lege teacher intrenches it and renders it almost 
unchangeable. 

Butj as was said, the college graduate attains 
not only one, but two great modem abstrac- 
tions. Not only the abstraction of subjects 
from one another, but the abstraction of all 
of them from life. These are but two distinct 
sides of the same thing. Each aggravates the 
other. For subjects become sundered not only 
for the convenience of specialists, but because 
of the ignoring of the one great thing that could 
organize them, — ^the larger purposes of a living 
world. And these purposes are slighted, in 
turn, because academic interest in subjects of 
education stop at life's portals. 

For, even in his teaching, it is scholarship 
rather than the institutions of life that the col- 
lege teacher is absorbed in, yes, in spite of him- 

56 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

self. The whole educational tradition, and par- 
ticularly his training" as a specialist, makes this 
inevitable. It is not that the college teacher 
conscionsly says to himself, ^^T mil now teach 
with the aim of making my students into schol- 
ars.'^ As a matter of fact, there is a general 
absence of conscious educational ideals for the 
student, save among administrators. The 
political ideal of education, for instance, some- 
times characterized as ^'education for democ- 
racy, '' or ^^ education for citizenship, '^ is but 
feebly present in our college faculties, sa,ve, per- 
haps, when their members travel forth to 
deliver commencement addresses. The ideal of 
^^efificiency'^ is prevalent mostly in professional 
and technical schools; or in the general em- 
phasis upon a liberal education as an efficient 
introduction to these. No, the ideal of scholar- 
ship for its own sake and of preparation for 
research is the predominant ideal, — not ex- 
plicitly conscious, but grimly and thoroughly 
real. Grades and prizes. Phi Beta Kappa keys 
and scholarships are given in the service of it. 
Education goes on as if the aim of life were the 
sort of abstract contemplation that some 
philosophers interpret as the occupation of 

57 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Aristotle's God. Educators frankly plead for 
pure science as the highest type of thought, for 
the humanities as such, for ^^disinterested 
thinking, '^ and lament the encroachments of the 
applications of learning as a sacrilege upon 
truth's sacred rights. 

Nothing has yet been said about the choice of 
subjects which comprise the average under- 
graduate's curriculum; only the manner of 
their teaching has been considered, — a manner 
l)om of the scholarship motif. But why just 
these subjects? Is there any real reason except 
they are the most conspicuous subjects in which 
scholars happen to be interested? Is there any 
other key to the curriculum, such as it is ? True, 
there is some degree of compliance with the 
demands of the social order, especially through 
the pressure upon the college of the profes- 
sional and the technical schools. But, after all, 
'Scholarship being the supreme thing, and schol- 
arship meaning to each professor the special 
learning of his own field, there is little curricu- 
lum-thinking. We may have one reason for 
including mathematics among the things the 
student must master; and another, perhaps a 
whoUy contradictory reason, for including po- 

58 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

litieal science ; bnt no one reason or ideal that 
might create a unified cnrricnlum. The chief 
proof of this is the ahnost incredible variety of 
ways by which the American college student 
may obtain the same degree. The subjects 
a college man studies are like the heaps of 
bricks and stones and mortar and lumber of an 
unbegun building ; nay, are they even this ? Are 
there here materials of the sort that could be 
assembled into any building whatsoever, — tem- 
ple or palace or hut? Has the average stu- 
dent ^s curriculum the merit even of a kaleido- 
scope, which, with all its chaotic variety, does 
at least form patterns? Eather, is it not to 
genuine education something as vaudeville is 
to the legitimate drama? 

Not a great many years ago, \he innovation 
of a free election of studies was made by many 
leading colleges in the name of vital and indis- 
pensable ideals. By many it was thought that 
for education a new day had dawned. The 
elective system would bring scientific subjects 
into the student ^s range of choice and give them 
equal rights with the time-honored humanities ; 
it would recognize the individual aptitudes of 
young minds in time and allow them to special- 

59 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

ize in those things in which their particular 
abilities fonnd free expression; and it would 
achieve the recognition of the important peda- 
gogical principle of educating students in terms 
of their own free interests. 

The results of this experiment have trans- 
formed education. The scientific subjects have 
indeed asserted their place along with the hu- 
manities, — ^sometimes even crowding them out; 
but the educational uses of the pure sciences in 
the colleges are more abstract than they ever 
were before. Students have been enabled to spe- 
cialize; but as a matter of fact most of thena 
omit to do so in any effective way. True, they 
now are educated in terms of their interests. 
But what sorts of interests? How are their 
interests motived? Why do college students 
choose one course rather than another? It is 
likely to be for such a casual reason as that 
the course is popular; or because it has the 
reputation of being easy; or because the stu- 
dent likes the professor who offers it; or be- 
cause his friends are in it ; or because it comes 
in the morning instead of in the afternoon ; or 
because he needs a three-hour course, and this 
is the only on^ that he can conveniently take? 

60 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

In other words, Ms motives are not the motives 
that belong to veritable life ; they are interests 
hardly worth recognizing; they are jnst as far 
removed from the obligation to the social order 
as the ideals of his teacher. So, stndent and 
professor reenf orce one another in making edu- 
cation irrelevant. Here, however, their co- 
operation ends. For, as has been shown, the 
stndent refuses to agree with any enthusiasm 
that his teacher ^s passion for scholarship is also 
Ms own main business. 

The instruments of academic scholarship are 
reason and memory; but the glory of youth is 
imagination and dreams. Our modem peda- 
gogy directs us to appeal to the interests of our 
students ; but the interests in mind are rational 
interests, rather than those of imagination and 
feeling. Our educational process not only fails 
to appeal to the imagination of youth, but 
actually discourages it. Not long ago, I was 
asked to pass upon a doctor's thesis in one of 
the social sciences. It was a dreary affair, — 
accurate, but dreary. The sort of thing wMch 
a student would hope forever to forget in the 
glad exchange of it for a Ph.D. degree. But, 
in the midst of this Sahara of abstractions, I 

61 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

came upon an oasis, — an accidental revelation 
of imaginative grasp that promised life to the 
endless caravan of words. I noticed that my 
colleague had marked this passage, and I was 
glad. I went to him and said, *^I am glad you 
noticed it, too.^^ He replied, ^^Yes, he^s got to 
strike that out!^^ 

The first result of the foisting of the scholar- 
ship ideal upon young men and women is not 
only to discourage any real enthusiasm for 
college study, but to encourage the many and 
absorbing student ^s activities, which alone 
make ' ' college life ^ ' vital and real. It is certain 
that most educators do not realize the under- 
lying cause of the abnormal place of these ac- 
tivities. The simple reason is that, since the 
student can find little that is vitally and con- 
cretely human in his courses, he must find it 
elsewhere. His real college life is a realm he 
creates after his heart's desire; the realm of 
such concrete things as football and baseball; 
fraternities and sororities, with their social 
diversions; student politics; student literary 
ventures ; student clubs and societies, many of 
them admirable as adjuncts to a sane and nor- 
mal education. The student's leisure time is 

62 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

taken np with these, rather than with reading 
in or converse about the central snbjects of his 
intellectual life. And the student's nse of his 
leisure time is the sure index to his real con- 
cerns. Anyone who is such a ^^ stick" as to be 
absorbed primarily in what the college regards 
as its main business is given the opprobrious 
epithet of ^^ grind." It is significant that by 
** student activities" one never means the ac- 
tivity of studying ! That task is a task indeed ; 
thought of, most frequently, as an unwelcome 
invasion upon the time to be devoted to things 
worth while. First things first; and, in many 
colleges, many of the more capable students 
have little time left for the scholarly ideals of 
their professors. Even their disapproval they 
can, perhaps, afford to ignore ; for the standard 
of student prominence is not scholarship at all ; 
but heroism on the gridiron, social leadership, 
or the attractive traits of the good fellow, — 
traits, strange to say, that the world, too, will 
prize in the student ^s life beyond college walls. 
Such things the student talks about, lives to the 
full. His college education is a necessary in- 
cident, vaguely undesirable, but to be tolerated 
as indispensable to make college life possible. 

63 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

Let ns glance at the fate of the subjects of 
college study when the student emerges into 
the world. If these subjects were hardly more 
than an incident of college life, they were at 
least a real incident; but they become the fast 
vanishing ghosts of dead things, after com- 
mencement. The ^'dear old college days^^ that 
the student sang about are remembered as the 
Eden of life ; but his studies are, most of them, 
laid aside forever. The comrades he knew, 
their friendship is cherished; but the subjects 
!he mulled o'er, where are they? They are one 
with last year's roses and lovers ; the seeds were 
planted — ^or were they seeds? — ^but now *^a« 
the heart of a dead man, the seed-plots are 
5ry.'' Even the texts were probably lost or 
loaned or sold at that glad time when the course 
was done and the grade safely recorded and the 
•student said in his heart, ^^ Thank God, I'm 
through with that!'' He began Greek; but 
Xenophon's parasangs and Homer 'S gods and 
heroes have disappeared like troubled dreams ; 
iand the wealth of the thought of Greece shall 
be forever dead to him. Even his French shall 
lapse, and Moliere and Racine and Hugo shall 
call in vain from unturned pages. Mathe- 

64 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

matics, — ^it opened no higHways to Mm, nnlesS 
some technical science called him to her exact- 
ing service. For a term or two, he knew some- 
thing of physics and chemistry; but five years 
later he will do well to remember the color of 
his text-books. These subjects were not begun 
to be continued; they were begun to be aban- 
doned. 

Perhaps all this means that his college gave 
him the wrong courses ; perhaps not. But their 
subject matter, at least, will have less to do with 
his later ambitions than the converse he had 
with his fellow-students. These subjects at- 
tained no continuity with life; in the struggle 
for existence, they were not deemed worthy to 
survive among life's permanent and gromng 
values. 

Perhaps there is only one thing worse than 
that the college student should forget his sub- 
jects ; and that is that he should remember them. 
For to remember them is most often to go into 
life confidently solving its problems with ab- 
stractions that do not fit ; as if one should talk 
in syllogisms in the market place, or try to 
breathe in two-dimensional space. Especially 
is this true if the emphasis has been upon the 

65 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

natural sciences tanght narrowly and without 
perspective. Now, nothing is mnch more essen- 
tial than that the modem student should know 
the fundamentals of the natural sciences. But 
it happens that the sciences are often taught 
as if they dealt primarily with concrete facts; 
at any rate, the student gets that impression. 
But science does not deal with concrete events 
as we live them, but only with abstracted as- 
pects of them. Yet, somehow, the law of gravi- 
tation, merely an abstract descriptive formula, 
comes to be regarded as more real than a law of 
morals or the thought of God. And since the 
student gets the impression that the objects of 
scientific regard are tangibly real objects and 
the only objects, and that the natural science 
method is the only method of demonstration, he 
is led also to the conviction that the spiritual 
is the unreal, because natural science knows it 
not. One does not find souls in test-tubes ; and 
in what laboratory shall God be disclosed as a 
concomitant variation? Inevitably, the student 
will tend to believe that ^^ science disproves 
God''; or that ^^ science disproves the souP'; or 
that ^ ' science disproves immortality, ^ ' — ^for- 
getting to ask which science; and unmindful 

66 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

that no natural science lias anything to do witK 
these things, either in content or in method. 
In other words, to the serions student, descrip- 
tive formulae and hypotheses will not only 
seem to be the real ; but these formulae will tend 
to be used to dispose of issues with which they 
have no concern. This is what I would like 
to call ''the pretension of concepts.'^ Since 
the academic mind has it, it is natural that its 
teaching should be subtly infected with it. So 
the graduate goes into the world, tending to 
believe that, for the truly enlightened, the con- 
cepts and methods of natural science take the 
place af all the age-old verities by which men 
once lived and died. 

Thinking scientists themselves see the peril 
of this. Says J. Arthur Thomson, *^We speak 
glibly of 'M^ter,' 'Energy,' 'Ether,' 'Atom,' 
and so on, but these are intellectual counters, 
rather than the realities themselves. They are, 
so to speak, counterfoils or symbols of reality. 
We may well say of them what Hobbes said of 
words: 'They are wise men's counters, they 
do but reckon by them, but they are the money 
of fools.'" 

These, then, are some of the ways in which 

67 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

colleges educate, when education is thonght of 
as an academic obligation. These things form 
the mind of the American college graduate, the 
tjTpical finished product, with variations beyond 
number. 

Just what is this education good for? For 
four years, the student has been fashioned by 
the academic uses of learning. Then, surely,, 
his education for scholarship has made a po- 
tential scholar of him, — at least that ! But no, 
— ^with exasperating irony, the clamors of the 
world have invaded the college just enough that 
the function of making the undergraduate a 
scholar, or even scholarly, is a farce. For 
example, the elective system, in its extreme 
form, was adopted partly because of the world's 
practical demands upon the college ; but it has 
been inimical to scholarship, while the manner 
of teaching the courses elected has destroyed 
their utility for the needs which the world so 
insistently urged upon educators. Scholar- 
ship? ^^We turn out from our American de- 
partments of liberal arts many clean and manly 
men, noble and earnest women. But how many 
even of these know the rudiments of one sub- 
ject thoroughly? '^ asks Professor Gayley. The 

68 



HOW COLLEGE PROFESSORS EDUCATE 

American student ^^does not seem to under- 
stand what it is independently to master a sub- 
ject, to grasp it in all its ramij&cations, and 
retain it in Ms memory as a whole/ ^* 

But surely a college education is good for 
something? No doubt. Just now, apart from 
its partial use as a preparation for vocational 
schools, it is good for that indefinable culture 
which is truly said to remain after one has for- 
gotten what one has learned. And the very 
best that can be said of this culture is summed 
up by Dean West, of Princeton. ^^What has 
he [the graduate] acquired in the four years? 
At least some insight into the terms and com- 
monplaces of liberal learning and some dis- 
cipline in the central categories of knowledge, 
some moral training acquired in the punctual 
performance of perhaps unwelcome daily duty 
and some reverence for things intellectual and 
spiritual. He is not only a very different man 
from what he was when he entered, but very 
different from what he could have become had 
he not entered. He is wiser socially. He is 
becoming cosmopolitan. Awkwardness, per- 
sonal eccentricity, conceit, diffidence, and all that 
* Charles Mills Gayley, Idols of Education, pp. 39, 40, 45. 

69 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

is callow or forward or perverse have been 
taken from him, so far as the ceaseless attrition 
of his fellow students and professors has 
touched him. He is still frank and unconven- 
tional. But he is more tolerant, better bal- 
anced, more cultivated and more open-minded, 
and thus better able to direct himself and 
others/'* 

This is admirable, so far as it goes, — ^aJthougE 
it seldom goes quite so far. At any rate, it tes- 
tifies that college education is by no means a 
failure. But that is not enough. The academic 
motive in the trainiag of American youth is not 
adequate. The social order requires men whom 
that motive cannot create, and yet whom the col- 
lege must be chiefly relied upon to produce. 
Besearch is an academic concern. Education 
for research is an academic concern. Beyond 
these things, nothing in education is an aca- 
demic concern. 

♦Andrew Fleming West, The American College, p. 29. 
One of a series of monographs in Education in the Umted 
States, edited by Nicholas Murray Butler. 



yn 

AMERICA AS AN EDUCATIONAL MOTIVE 

For some time there have been leaders in 
education who have been well aware that the 
American college has not been fnlfilling ade- 
qnately its unwritten contract with society and 
the state. The result has been the proposal of 
educational aims intended to connect college 
education in some vital way with the social 
order. Education is to embrace not merely 
ideas, but ideals; not only subjects, but objects 
as well. 

The proposed ideals are surprisingly various, 
land even conflicting. No one of them has gained 
both general and exclusive recognition; and 
some of those that have been most popular have 
not been effective, save as rhetorical shibbo- 

71 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

leths. There is a plenitude of educational pur- 
poses; but when was discussion concerning 
college education so bewildered with the lack of 
a connnon standard? When so tentative, so 
harassed with a multitude of conflicting 
theories? Everyone connects education with 
the social order in his own way; and this way 
is quite likely to be dijfferent from everybody 
else^s way. Worst of all, it is likely to be vague. 
Education is learning to think; no, it is learn- 
ing to do; not at all, it is for the training of 
citizens; but stop, — ^it is for vocational effi- 
ciency; on the contrary, it is for liberal culture; 
ah, but do not forget that it is for moral self- 
realization, — it is education for character that 
we want; no, it is for successful adaptation to 
ihe human environment of one's time; or, it is 
for social service. Its fundamental content is 
science; on the contrary, it is the humanities; 
uo, the content is not the main thing at all, it 
is the discipline that counts ; but discipline is a 
mistake, one can educate for concrete living 
only through the play of free interests ; so, what 
we need is freedom of election ; no, we need more 
rigidly prescribed curricula. Education is for 
the few, anyway; what! education is for allj it 

72 



AlIEEICA AS AN EDUCATIONAL MOTIVE 

is tlie spiritual expression, the guarantee and 
triumpli of democracy! 

These conflicts of theory are encouraging 
signs. For it is through such conflicts that a 
new motive must be formulated. None of these 
ideals may be efficient ; but their mere existence 
signifies a strenuous idealism. This new 
idealism is the biggest thing in education to- 
day. The important thing is that there is an 
unprecedented search for the unacademic and 
true purpose of the college. We may still be 
idealists without a common ideal, but the sig- 
nificant fact is that we do inexorably demand it^ 
and are conscious that education cannot intel- 
ligently proceed without it. Moreover, it is a 
critical idealism. The ideals of yesterday ^s edu- 
cation were largely traditional and unques- 
tioned ; they just grew. To-day, they must meet 
th6 challenge of a new self-conscious reason, 
clarified by the vantage-points of an insistent 
social reconstruction. 

No one of these newer ideals has yet gained 
general and exclusive recognition over the tra- 
ditional and tacitly understood ideal of schol- 
arship. Still, one ideal has succeeded far be- 
yond all others, and threatens to submerge the 

73 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

rest, — the persistent and nncompromising ideal 
of vocational efficiency. This ideal has reso- 
lutely invaded the college, until its function has 
tended more and more to be narrowed to that 
of preparing the student for his later technical 
specialization in a professional school. This 
means that when college education is not re- 
garded from the standpoint of the academic, it 
is likely to be regarded from the standpoint of 
the vocational. If the choice were merely be- 
tween liberal scholarship and vocational train- 
ing, then this latter ideal might be the finally 
right one; it at least does connect education 
with some of life's most insistent values and 
obligations. But is our obligation to the social 
order chiefly or solely found within our voca- 
tions as doctors, or lawyers, or engineers? 
There are many who will say so ; or will say that 
any other ideal is so vague as to be of no edu- 
cational value. Such would transform the col- 
lege of arts into little more than a pre-vocational 
school, with curricula adapted to just this pur- 
pose. 

But we were men before we were engineers 
or lawyers, and ought to be men afterwards. 
We are of particular guilds ; but we belong to 

74 



AMERICA AS AN EDUCATIONAL MOTIVE 

a bigger thing than that, the only thing that 
makes any guild worth while. There is still a 
vocation above aU vocations, — or is this only 
one of those glamorous generalities that awake 
the academic mind^s disdain? If so, the social 
order, in any real sense, is a shadow; obliga- 
tions to it a myth ; and truth the one thing that 
has no morals, — save the bloodless morals of 
technical success. The vocational ideal is an 
excellent ideal, — ^for the vocational school. It 
is not to be the supreme motive of the coUege^ 
or of the nniversity as a whole. The purpose 
of the college mnst be coincident with whatever 
is the supreme moral obligation of the age. It 
wiU be a wider and a deei)er thing than schol- 
arship on the one hand, or technical efficiency 
on the other; althongh it wiU demand both of 
these with all its soul. 

To say that education mnst connect itself with 
the social order in general, and with the Amer- 
ican social order in particular, through some 
bigger way than through training in the various 
vocations, is futile, nnless we make our work- 
ing conception of this social order exceedingly 
definite. The advantage of the vocational 
ideal, and one of the chief reasons for its vogue, 

75 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

is that it is nt least specific, — it is not a vapid 
generality. It means a definite purpose, to be 
attained by definite methods. The same cannot 
be said of any other social purpose yet pro- 
posed. 

Yet, what we call the American social order 
is snrely a definitely concrete social order, — 
the social order that is here and now, nniqnely 
organized, with its own intimate past and its 
own specific fntnre, with exceedingly definite 
concrete problems and ideals. The mainten- 
ance of a very definite American order was the 
real motive of the American people in estab- 
lishing education in the first place, — ^not the 
motive of scholarship; not the vocational mo- 
tive. Onr whole common school movement 
arose for one central purpose, — ^to serve a na- 
tion; to maintain the institutions of our 
democracy. Typical of the thought of the early 
advocates of American education are the words 
of Webster, '*0n the diffusion of education 
among the people rests the preservation and 
perpetuation of our free institutions.'^ In 
terms of this ideal is our recognition of a gov- 
ernmental responsibility for education, ex- 
pressed in the constitutional provisions of the 

76 



AMEEICA AS AN EDUCATIONAL MOTIVE 

states; in onr taxation for education; in our 
compulsory laws; in our national appropria- 
tions and land grants ; and in the establishment 
and maintenance of our national Bureau of 
Education. Nor may it be claimed that this 
motive of obligation to the social order applies 
only to the elementary school, not to the high 
school and the college. In general, higher edu- 
cation in America is the inevitable, although 
scarcely calculated result of the momentum of 
the common school movement. The belief in 
higher education is a corollary of the belief in 
education for a definite sort of civilization, 
coupled with the characteristically American 
demand for the best. 

The initial motive of the American people in 
conceiving their well-known passion for educa- 
tion was right. The aim of American education 
is to produce a definite American social order, 
in relation to a definite world-order. But why, 
then, has not this initial purpose continued reg- 
nant? Why has it been abandoned gradually, 
almost insensibly, until it has become little more 
than a rhetorical flourish? 

For the simple and suiBEicient reason that the 
conception of the American social order has 

77 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Ibeen too nebulous, too vague, to be educationally 
efficient. It conld hardly be otherwise. A well- 
defined national consciousness does not realize 
itself in a day. 

But the time has come when a new national 
consciousness is both possible and necessary. 
It must be new in two senses : it must be crit- 
ically defined; and it must be realized as a 
supreme obligation — a national consciousness, 
w^hich is an ethical consciousness as well. For 
the aim of education is not merely to continue 
a social order, but to mold it; not merely to 
adapt the individual to it, but to train the in- 
dividual to change both the social order and 
himself to the ideal of what the social order is 
not, but ought to be. The national consciousness 
is not to be static ; it is to be dynamic. We need 
not only American ideas, but American ideals. 
And we have such ideals. It is characteristic 
of us Americans to think of ourselves in terms 
of the future. Our well-known optimistic tem- 
per bespeaks a firm faith in that future. We 
are a nation of idealists. And our ideal is made 
up of that complex of social and political insti- 
tutions which can be characterized as ^Hhe 
American social order as we intend to make 

78 



AMERICA AS AN EDUCATIONAL MOTIVE 

it," in spite of the fact that many of ns Amer- 
icans are so careless in our optimism as to let 
the future take care of itself. 

It is to this ideal that the college owes its 
first obligation. This America of onrs is not 
made yet. The supreme business of the college 
is to create its fashioners. Educational monas- 
ticism is to give way to educational statesman- 
ship- 

Now, this ideal may be said to be vague. But 
it is not too vague for legislation to take place 
in terms of it every year ; for policies of state- 
craft to flourish or fall by its judgments; for 
wide-spread and significant discussions of every 
conceivable social problem to proceed under the 
compelling power of its purpose and hope, and 
to be decided in its name. Strange if the social 
scientist could not define this American social 
order, when he is so fairly adept in defining 
the genius of Dante ^s Italy or of Elizabeth's 
England, — ^which genius was a social tendency, 
unconsciously become a social purpose, pervad- 
ing and molding a civilization. We have no hesi- 
tation in saying that there is such a thing as 
a characteristically Greek view of life, a Greek 
art, a Greek society, a Greek religion; and a 

79 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Greek ideal pervading every one of these. If 
Greece had possessed a system of education that 
knew exactly what it was about, it would have 
discovered this ideal, and turned all education 
to its account. This is precisely what the two 
greatest Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, thought 
should be done. "Well, just so, there is such a 
thing as an American view of life, and of Amer- 
ican society, and of American literature, and the 
rest, in various degrees of accomplishment ; and 
an American ideal pervading all these. And 
when college educators know exactly what they 
are about, they shall have discovered this ideal 
and turned our American education to its ser- 
vice. 

But, one may answer, we have timers good 
perspective with which to evaluate those civili- 
zations so ^^far away and long ago.'^ It is 
perilous to attempt to estimate one ^s own age 
and one^s own country. Is it? We do it atny- 
way, and act every day upon the evaluation. 
The World War did not find us Americans en- 
tirely wanting in the consciousness of exceed- 
ingly definite and exacting ideals, — ideals not 
only poKtical, but social, industrial, cultural, 
moral, and even religious. When fighting Ger- 

80 



AMEEICA AS AN EDUCATIONAL MOTIVE 

many, we were confident of a very definite 
American social order as it is and as it shall 
be. Indeed, we told our yonth to die for it, — 
it was definite enough for that ! Then why not 
definite enough for our youth to live for it, and 
so be educated for it? In preparing its soldiers 
for the war, our government went so far as to 
plan a War Aims Course for the thousands of 
members of the Student Army Training Corps, 
in attendance upon our colleges. It was speci- 
fied that an important part of this course should 
be an exposition of the specific ideals pervading 
the various nations at war; including, with 
natural emphasis, our own country. The as- 
sumption was that we were fighting for worthy 
American ideals ; that they could be ascertained ; 
and that the soldier's heart and mind would be 
strengthened, even for the supreme sacrifice, by 
the knowledge. Was all this folly? If not, have 
these puirposes of the American social order 
vanished mth victory? Or, are they not needed 
now, more than ever before, to make sure the 
progress of those very institutions of civiliza- 
tion for which the war was fought and for which 
our soldiers died? Would it not be the supreme 
appeal if the American college could say to the 

81 



THE COLLEGE AND ^PJEW AMERICA 

young men who survive and enter its gates, 
*^Yonr comrades died for a very definite and 
real thing called America; yon and the yonth 
of to-morrow are to be edncated for this same 
definite and real and priceless thing !^^ 

This is no narrow conception of education. 
For, as will be shown, the American order and 
the world-order have common obligations in the 
larger terms of cnlturCj. 



vni 

THE TRUTH WORTH TEACHHSTG 

Fortunately, we do not have to await a full 
interpretation of the American order before we 
can conmience to reorganize college education 
as an obligation to snch an ideal. If we merely 
admit the issne, that true education is in the 
service of an actual social' purpose, education 
wiU be transformed mightily. Let us now see 
what is the fundamental nature and some of the 
general results of such a conception. I shall 
yet make my own attempt to define the Amer- 
ican social order and hazard the further and 
stiU more specific results entailed by it. It is 
well, first, to see what would happen to the 
college under any interpretation of America. 
Then that much progress, at least, shall be se- 
cure, even if the writer ^s or somebody else's 

83 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

particnlar view of onr national consciousness 
happen to be greatly at fanlt. THe mere ac- 
ceptance of the new criterion of education would 
modify many traditions not greatly cherished 
now, but retained from pure inertia; and it 
would modify them for the better. 

First of all, college education would be re- 
lieved of the pervasive tradition of emphasizing 
facts over the values that alone give any sig- 
nificance to facts; of stressing the merely de- 
scriptive aspects of learning above its nor* 
mative aspects ; of putting the impersonal above 
the human; realism above idealism. When we 
view such one-sided emphases, made relatively 
permanent, the nature of the academic abstrac- 
tion falsely called ^Hruth'^ becomes clear at 
last. It is not only a separation of ideas from 
ideals, but a tyranny of ideas over ideals, of the 
barely factual over the worthy. This static and 
sundered view of truth is world-old. It has al- 
ways been associated with mere ^^learning^'; 
land with educational projects motived by the 
merely learned. To put it otherwise, in the 
evolution of the race, our thinking, which arose 
for the service of progressive life, has over- 
functioned in coming to exist for itself alone. 

84 



THE TRUTH WORTH TEACHING 

Snch thinking is an anomalous by-prodnct of 
progress. It may be truth, after a sort; but it 
is truth that has lost its bearings. The relative 
supremacy must be reversed; the new concep- 
tion of educational truth makes values inter- 
pret facts, ideals transform ideas, the norms of 
living transfigure life's host of descriptive 
items. For we live not in a world that is merely 
a panorama of facts, and where truth is just a 
matter of describing and cataloguing these facts. 
We live in a world where we seek to mold all 
facts to our purposes, and whose most signi- 
ficant problems, therefore, are problems of how 
to interpret facts and to compel facts into the 
service of great aims, — ^themselves thoroughly 
tested and approved. This means, more tersely 
put, that education should be a training of the 
rational will rather than of the passive reason, 
so long aloof from its human significances. 
Vital truth is not the solution of a problem so 
much as the correct statement of a problem to 
be solved not by thought alone, but by deeds. 
It is not so much a recital of events as they have 
been and are, as a plan of action that creates 
new events. It is not static, but dynamic. 
The purposes that motivate and test this 

85 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

world of truth are utterly outside the sciences 
as such. The purpose of the sciences is truth 
for truth ^s sake; here, the purpose is truth for 
the sake of something else, — for the sake of 
the distinct service that truth can render ; which 
creates a neiv thing, serviceable truth, or truth 
transformed for service. If the scientist is to 
have abstractions here, they are not to be ab- 
stractions snatched from the upper air, — ^nay, 
not even abstractions from life ; they are to be 
transformed into abstractions working in and 
through life, and so no mere abstractions at 
all. 

Perhaps an analogy from the applied phy- 
sical sciences will help. An applied physical 
science is never just a pure physical science, 
with merely the addition that it is applied to 
something, as paint to a house. Physics, when 
applied, suddenly becomes a variety of new 
things, none of which is just physics, or even 
Just applied physics. No, we suddenly have 
upon our hands engineering and practical optics 
and aviation and the multitude of special re- 
gions which the principles of physics serve ; and 
which, through and for this service, become 
adapted and transformed. Just so, the success- 

86 



THE TRUTH WORTH TEACHING 

ful application of a political theory to a con- 
crete state means to transform that political 
theory into something new, — a system of prin- 
ciples of practical statecraft, also vitally and 
concretely related to a multitude of social ten- 
dencies that are not at all primarily political. 

This is the nniqne realm of truth that serves 
the social order. It is the only truth that has 
any direct relation to that order. This is, as 
will be shown, the type of educational truth that 
ought to belong to the undergraduate college. 

This transformation of truth is akin to Aris- 
totle's transformation of Plato's Ideas. Plato 
tended to make Ideas real, apart from the things 
of this changing and imperfect world, which, at 
last, almost disappeared for him as an illu- 
sion. Thus, the Idea of horses became more 
real than actual horses. Aristotle gives these 
phantom Ideas reality again, by finding their 
reality to consist only in this same changing 
world of particular things, whose meanings are 
the soul of the concrete universe. It is akin to 
the Pragmatism of recent days, in so far, and 
only in so far, as an indispensable part of the 
educational meaning of truth is *Hhat which 
works, '^ ^Hhat which gives satisfaction''; not 

87 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

to be defined in merely rational terms as a 
^^ dome-like, temple-like system'^; bnt finding 
something of its measure and test in the realm 
of human experience, complete and whole. 

Now, the chief danger to guard against, in 
this conceiving of educational truth as ^^ plans 
of action,'^ is that it shall grow to signify that 
materialistic practicalness which nowadays 
goes by the seductive name of *^ efficiency.'^ 
What we have been defining is, indeed, educa- 
tion for efficiency; but it is not the efficiency 
now commonly in mind as a rallying cry. No, 
if it is efficiency that we desire, it is a new 
efficiency; the old has been foimd wanting in 
many important respects. 

For, observe our commonly vaunted effi- 
ciency ! It has pervaded all realms, — ^business, 
government, social work, religion. It has in- 
vaded even the spelling of words. When we 
ask what all this efficiency is for, we find that 
its purpose is not so clearly defined as are its 
methods. We discover that it reduces itself 
largely to time-and-space-saving methods; yet, 
we hesitate to think that time and space are the 
most valuable things we possess ! Doubtless all 
this efficiency arose for the accomplishment of 

88 



THE TEUTH WORTH TEACHING 

indispensable hnman aims; bnt gradually, the 
passion for efficiency for its o^\m sake has sup- 
planted the hnman purposes for which it came 
into being; or, these purposes have become more 
and more materialistic, partly because most of 
the tools of the time-and-space efficiency are 
themselves material tools; as printing-presses 
and typewriters and automobiles. In education, 
this efficiency, at the best, has merged itself into 
the particular sort that is called vocational. 

In the stress of this materialistic efficiency 
have been lost many of our moral ideals, 
individual, national, and international; the 
very ideals a true efficiency should serve. 
The issues of the war have helped us to regain 
some of them. At any rate, the academic mind 
has been indirectly and partly responsible for 
the reign of materialistic efficiency, of which the 
German aggression was only one symptom. 
For, the educator has too often left ^^ practical^ ' 
issues to the materialist; so that to be practical 
now means to most people to be materially suc- 
cessful. He had in his keeping many of the 
spiritual interests of mankind; he could have 
urged the higher practicalness, that large and 
sane idealism which the intellectual life sub- 

89 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

serves. But lie has tended to betray his trust, 
by emphasizing spiritual abstractions, rather 
than those spiritual purposes that are the center 
and circumference of civilization. It is for the 
educator from now on to insist upon the higher 
efficiency, — the efficiency of sound social ideals 
and of expert means of attaining them, the 
efficiency of a new national consciousness and 
of a new national conscience. 

Buch an ideal will include the vocational ideal, 
T3tit will not be submerged by it. At this critical 
time, it will contribute to social reconstruction 
a moral motive. This moral motive is impera- 
tively needed now, after a war which has 
hastened the final break-down of the traditional 
standards of individuals, societies, and govern- 
ments. Such a disintegration of customary 
norms is an essential stage in social rebuilding. 
But the danger is that we shall fail to furnish 
our new system of efficiencies with their su- 
preme motive and purpose; or furnish it too 
late, — ^just as the greater Greek philosophers 
came too late with their constructive social pro- 
gram to save the glory that was Greece. 

This conception of the business of the college 
accords well not only with the aim of the Amer- 

90 



THE TRUTH WORTH TEACHING 

ican people in establishing edncation, but with 
the natural interests of the earnest student, at 
least at the time when he enters college. The 
college teacher is likely to find his Freshmen 
eager at first and almost enthusiastic in the 
prosecution of their subjects of study. But 
there is something about the college ^atmosphere 
that gradually, insensibly, robs them of their 
initial ardor for the things of scholarship. They 
gradually transfer their center of interest from, 
their studies to the student activities that have 
been reviewed. Nothing could speak more elo-» 
quently of the student ^s natural and inera- 
dicable preference for the values of experience^ 
rather than the mere facts of books. One can^ 
not, must not, blame the student. In these stu- 
dent activities, he creates, all unknowingly, a 
needed corrective of merely academic ideals. 
It might rest here ; but his corrective is not the 
ultimately best one that might be devised ; there 
is a sure way to make the educational processes 
of the college the veritable center of student 
activities and culture, instead of a resented en- 
croachment. It can be done at once by seriously 
considering education as belonging to that same 
realm within which the student has lived before 

91 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

Ihe came to college; in which he insists npon 
living Vv^hile in college ; and in which he will cer- 
tainly live afterwards, and find his cherished 
goals. The student well knows, although he can- 
not articulate it, that somehow his courses fall 
short of the living truth. He knows in his heart 
that, somehow, these abstracted bits of reality, 
physical, chemical, psychological, sociological 
and what not, are not truth. They are not fitted 
for wisdom's uses. They do not represent real- 
ity as it is; they represent a world carefully 
dissected, a shattered world, with no clue how to 
put it together again. If our college students 
understood the true significance of what has 
been done to them, they might well cry out the 
lament of the chorus of spirits in Faust: 

'^Woe! Woe! 
Thou hast destroyed 
The beautiful world 
With violent blow; 
'Tis shivered; 'tis shattered! 



**Now we sweep 
The wrecks into nothingness! 
Fondly we weep 
The beauty that's gone!'* 

92 



THE TEUTH WOETH TEACHING 

For the dissection of life, however thorough, 
if left in its fragments, kills life and its truth, 
and its beauty as well. Beauty? "When has col- 
lege education ever aimed to see life in its 
beauty? Would the proposal ever survive the 
confident derision of the enlightened? But if 
the educator may not, at present, reconstruct 
the world in terms of beauty, may we not rea- 
sonably ask him to put the world together again 
for the plain truth's sake? 

*'Thou, 'mongst the sons of earth, 
Lofty and mighty one, 
Build it once more!" 

Mere educational machinery fails. The 
groves of academe are cluttered with it. No, 
the solution of the educational problem is this 
new and definite moral consciousness, trans- 
lated into a new and very definite national con- 
sciousness. Mere educational machinery in- 
spires neither teacher nor student; this reaches 
both, and becomes the life of the machine. The 
educator is not a transmitter of information 
and method ; he is a creator, — a creator just as 
truly as Shakespeare was a creator; only, 
Shakespeare's characters walked the stage in 

93 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

a world of seeimng; while the educator ^s char- 
acters walk in a world that really is, and creates 
the world that shall be. Snch creation, within 
a vision of American purposes, enlists not only 
the reason of yonth, bnt the imagination and the 
constructive dream that is the fire of youth and 
the genius of age. The kind of success that a 
youth may achieve without them is a poor suc- 
cess. Without them, the college can give him 
no ideals worth suJfTering for, worth dying for. 
And an ideal not worth dying for is not worth 
living for, — or the men we acclaim as the earth ^s 
great were fools. 

This, then, is the very general nature of edu- 
cational truth, when college education is 
thought of as an obligation to a national con- 
sciousness, in the broad sense. In terms of it, 
the education of the future is to be the impart- 
ing of art in its wider significance, rather than 
of science in its narrower significance. The col- 
lege is to be a ^^ college of arts'^ indeed! 

"What further specific transformations would 
this ideal involve in our American colleges, ir- 
respective, still, of what we shall define our na- 
tional consciousness to be? 



IX 



SOME NEXT THINGS IN COLLEGE EDUCATION 

The first great result of the new ideal would 
be a definite revision of college curricula. Now, 
an adequate curriculum for any given student 
means the solution of what subjects he shall 
take, and their successful correlation, — such a 
correlation as gives his education a unity of per- 
spective, as well as cumulative worth as he pro- 
ceeds. To put the matter in terms of previous 
discussions, it means the doing away with intel- 
lectual monasticism and provincialism, — ^the 
isolation of subjects from a social purpose, and 
the isolation of subjects from each other. With 
the passing of the academic mind as a teaching 
mind, there disappear these two abstractions 
that belong to its teaching. Once sure that the 
prayer is for bread, we shall no longer answer it 
with this stone. 

What subjects should the American college 

95 



> 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEBICA 

stndent be required to study? The only prin- 
ciple that can solve this question is a broad 
principle of utility. 

Scholarship is not such a principle. It gives 
no reason for choosing one subject rather than 
another; it says, merely, Whatever subject you 
do choose, be scholarly, — cherish it for the 
truth ^s sake. The only principle of selection 
is haphazard, depending upon what subjects 
scholars happen to find interesting. It has come 
to pass, at this age of the world ^s learning, that 
scholarship (not the scholar) is catholic enough 
to be interested in everything. There is such a 
thing as scholarship in any subject. There is 
no principle of selection here, — ^none whatever ; 
that is why we have made no selection worth 
while. 

But while there is such a thing as scholar- 
ship in any subject, there is not such a thing as 
education for the social order in any subject, — 
not for this social order called America, if 
stringently enough defined. This social order 
furnishes the principle of utility that we have 
been seeking. It is not too narrow, as the util- 
ity of vocationalism ; nor too broad and vague, 
as the familiar slogan of *^ education for char- 

96 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

acter/^ or ^'edncation for social service/' or 
^^ education for democracy,'^ — ^vagaries in terms 
of which most well-intentioned reforms in edu- 
cation have been damned. 

The college, thns keyed to the social order, 
wonld allow a certain freedom of election of 
studies. But the choice of subjects would be 
far more carefully supervised than now, because 
definitely motived. There would be as many, 
probably more, absolutely required subjects; 
but these w^ould not be required merely because 
they are ^^fundamental subjects, '^ as now; but 
because they are fundamental to the achieve- 
ment of a definitely concrete result, which is not 
now the case, since we do not ^^foisf extra- 
neous educational aims upon the student, but 
let him assume the responsibility of deciding 
for himself — and for us — ^the aims of college 
education. The college of to-morrow will insist 
that its educational experts shall have some re- 
sponsibility for this; that they shall supplant 
the relative caprice of the immature student 
with the wisdom of expert maturity, in matters 
that so profoundly affect the student's future 
and the social welfare. The Freshman is ill 
equipped to decide for himself the aims of edu- 

97 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

cation. It is not even a good training in ini- 
tiative to allow him to do so. Such freedom is 
not educational democracy; it is edncational 
anarehy. The teacher and the administrator are 
not ill equipped for such decisions; they have 
the maturity, the experience, the perspective; 
and it is only a false modesty that pursues a 
policy of educational laissez faire and is too 
squeamish to insist upon educational convic- 
tions which, however wide of the mark, are 
better than those of the tyro, who enters college 
not to teach the college the aim of his education, 
but to be taught this very thing. Already we 
know the miscellany of reasons he gives for his 
choice of courses and how inconsequential most 
of them are, even in his own eyes I 

Next, the college, adjusted to its new obliga- 
tion, would eliminate the smatterers and the 
smatter-makers. Certainly, with all subjects 
selected for and dedicated to a large concrete 
purpose, we shall, for the first time in latter- 
day education, insist upon the mastery of a sub- 
ject, no matter what that subject may be, — ^not 
merely the mastery of principles, but the mas- 
tery of the special use of principles. No credit 
toward graduation should be given for any sub- 

98 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

ject not so mastered, even thongli the student 
be allowed to take it. For instance, a language 
for the language's sake should not be taught to 
undergraduates ; it should be taught as the effi- 
cient introduction to the literature of the lan- 
guage at least ; to the oral understanding of the 
language, if possible, — and no credit should be 
given for it until such a living mastery is ef- 
fected. What a transformation this would win 
in both the method of the teacher and the atti- 
tude of the learner ! And a like transformation 
would result in every other course worthy of a 
place in the undergraduate's curriculum. 

Ah, but the study of some subjects — ^as lan- 
guage — for their own sakes is valuable dis- 
cipline, even if it leads to nothing else. Surely, 
discipline is essential for any social order ! The 
adequate reply is that the study of any subject 
short of a degree of applied mastery is a dis- 
cipline which defeats the very idea of discipline. 
All subjects should be taught with discipline; 
none for the discipline only, for the simple 
reason that to do so is arrant educational waste 
and perversion; a bore to the teacher and an 
affliction to the student. 

Further, the college, though motived by the 

99 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEIOA 

social order, wonld not teach subjects of sncli a 
nature, or in sncli a way, that they perish at 
commencement. The selection of subjects in 
terms of a definite purpose, mastered with un- 
mistakable relevance to the American social 
structure, would mean that these subjects would 
be continuous with life after commencement, and 
thus become that most desirable kind of cul- 
ture, — the culture which is an acquired passion 
for great things. Subjects abandoned at gradu- 
ation are an unqualified condemnation either 
of the worth of these subjects for the educa- 
tion of the given student, or of the manner in 
which they are taught. They are significant not 
so much of the failure of the student as of the 
failure of his college. Of course, not every sub- 
ject of college study will find its place among 
life's dear desires ; there must be trial and error 
in college education, as in everything else 
human. But the error should be so minimized 
that what the student began in college shall, in 
the large, find its fullness of life beyond the col- 
lege. The college curriculum should be to the 
life of the social order what the study of law be- 
comes to the lawyer, — ^the defining of his aims 
and of the means to attain them. Or, to put it 

100 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

otherwise, the social order should be considered 
as the next stage in the education of the college 
man, to which all his previous education unmis- 
takably leads. Ten years from his graduation, 
his college interests should have gro\\m to robust 
maturity; not be lost among the illusions of 
youth — the sort not even sighed for! Either 
this, or the American social order is not worth 
life and death, as we stoutly insist when we^ 
are aware of being most highly ourselves. 

Above all, the college sincerely serving the 
concrete order would, perforce, institute a new 
correlation of college studies. This is the sec- 
ond side of curriculum-planning; the second 
essential, too, for genuine mastery, and con- 
tinuity, and the overcoming of intellectual pro- 
vincialism. If it needs a well-defined purposive 
principle to select subjects, it requires the same 
principle to relate them and to organize them,, 
after they are successfully selected. Indeed, 
this is the more difficult task, and the one which 
the American college has least courageously 
faced. How hard it is to hold apart ethics and 
sociology and economics and political science; 
chemistry and physics and biology! Yet, how 
easy it is to hold apart the ethicists and the 

101 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

sociologists and the economists and the political 
scientists; the chemists, the physicists and the 
l)iologists! These subjects are all aspects of 
Something; but the subjects themselves cannot 
determine what this Something is. The Fresh- 
man does not know enough to determine it ; and 
the individual teacher ignores this Something, 
because he is a specialist; and because he is 
very suspicious that this Something, so unde- 
sirably vague to him, cannot be made efficiently 
•clear. Yet, the very notion of specialization 
involves such a Something, of which any sub- 
ject is just this or that specialization. And 
this Something is other than mere Learning or 
Truth; which, by the way, although passively 
accepted as real by the specialist, is the very 
vaguest Something in all the catalogue of edu- 
cational purposes ! 

No, this Something is life ; a very particular 
sort of life, the American life; related to a 
world-life ; conceived as a definite structure and 
purpose. If such a purpose should turn out to 
be itself vague — ^which the logic of our faith for- 
bids — ^it will never be so vague as that same 
Scholarship, or Truth, by which the college of 
to-day lives and suffers. 

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SOME NEXT THINGS 

Let specialists get together. 

Now, just as specialists, they need never get 
together to determine what the concrete Some- 
thing is for whose varionsly essential aspects 
they toil. But as educators of undergraduates, 
they become super-specialists, and must get to- 
gether, in order to correlate their functions and 
results. 

Perhaps the most anomalous fact in college 
education to-day is that they never do get to- 
gether for this vital educational program. 
Faculty meetings do discuss educational policy ; 
but educational policy of what sort? Did any- 
one ever hear of a series of faculty meetings, 
outside a vocational school, which attempted 
systematically, and as precisely as possible, the 
correlation of the functions of the various 
sciences, in view of a specific educational pur- 
pose other than scholarship? Hours are spent 
in the discussion of grades ; of credits ; of rule 
upon rule, revised and re-revised; and the ma- 
chinery of education: is, indeed, oiled and pol- 
ished and frequently repaired. But there is not 
time, there is little disposition, to discuss the 
fundamental educational question, save cas- 
ually. The psychologic atmosphere of the ordi- 

103 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

nary faculty meeting discourages this ; and sncH 
extraordinary faculty meetings as may reso- 
kitely face it have yet to convene. 

Association meetings of college professors 
are plentiful ; but they are, almost wholly, meet- 
ings of specialists in some one subject, such as 
history or mathematics, who get together for 
their special academic interests. From such 
meetings we cannot expect solutions of the edu- 
cational question; first, because specialists as 
such are not chiefly or at all interested in educa- 
tional questions; and, second, because if they 
were, they simply could not, as specialists in one 
field, solve them adequately. 

Precisely the sort of body essential to the 
solution of the question of correlation is the 
recently organized American Association of 
University Professors, which includes all the 
varieties of specialists enlisted in college teach- 
ing. Here is a body versatile enough and repre- 
sentative enough to achieve a new definition of 
educational aims and methods. 

If specialists did get together, not as spe- 
cialists merely, but as educators, with a concrete 
purpose for education in mind, they would be 
likely to discover that, while academic speciali- 

104 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

zation in a given subject means its separation 
from other subjects, the educational uses of it, 
the teaching of it to undergraduates, just as 
surely requires its correlation with other sub- 
jects. Without the slightest question, the voca- 
tional school finds this so. Mathematics is one 
thing; the educational use of mathematics in 
engineering is another thing, and relates mathe- 
matics to a score of other fields. Anatomy is 
one thing; but the educational use of anatomy 
for surgery is quite a different thing, and cor- 
relates anatomy to much learning that is not 
anatomy. So, economics, or chemistry, or his- 
tory is a specific thing, academically regarded ; 
but for any definite educational use, each is 
transformed, and straightway finds an organic 
relation, consciously present to the teacher, if 
it is to be made educationally worthy. 

How may such correlation be effected, once 
the necessity for it is realized? Well, ulti- 
mately, it means the rewriting of most text- 
books ; but this is a far-off thing. Practically, 
it can be effected, first of all, by arranging all 
courses in carefully related groups, so that the 
student shall, in the main, choose not one single 
course, but alternative groups of courses. 

105 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

Someone will reply that we have gronp systems 
already. The answer is, first, that our group 
systems are, at best, but loosely administered; 
and, second, that they are devised on the basis 
of the resemblance of subject-matter, not related 
as functions in a specific aim for education. 
Without such an aim, carefully defined and lived 
up to, the correlation of courses is casual and 
unreal. 

It has just been said that our group systems 
are, at best, but loosely administered. The col- 
lege student needs expert advice in his choice 
of a group of subjects and of particular studies 
within the group he may have chosen. Nearly 
all colleges have advisers ; but, commonly, they 
are chosen casually, take their tasks casually, 
and with no sure cooperation in large educa- 
tional aims. Advisers, to be truly efficient, 
should be carefully selected ; they should form a 
committee, meeting from time to time for com- 
mon counsel and for the solution of the typical 
educational problems that concretely and con- 
tinually arise. Their functions should be 
differentiated for underclassmen, on the one 
hand, and upperclassmen, on the other. Taking 
their responsibilities seriously, they alone 

106 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

conld almost transform the entire educational 
regime. From them should emerge the most 
vital educational questions that could come be- 
fore a college faculty for decision; and which 
would awake it, as nothing else could, to a virile 
educational consciousness. 

Again, correlation of studies may be attained 
by special correlation-courses, to be given dur- 
ing the junior and senior years. Our fixed 
method now is to offer courses through single 
departments. But such correlation-courses as I 
now propose should be given through the co- 
operation of several departments. They should 
be regarded as the most important, the most 
significant courses in the undergraduate's col- 
lege life. All else should be planned to lead up 
to these, as the climax and rationale of his edu- 
cation. This would make his education cumu- 
lative. It would do away with the requirements 
for graduation as the mere amassing of units of 
credit. Subjects would not be forgotten as soon 
as completed. In a later chapter, the definite 
subject-matter of one such correlation-course 
will be suggested. 

In no event would the American college, ac- 
commodated to its new ideal, allow the comple- 

107 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

tion of a course to mean the finishing of its 
function in the student '^s college career. He 
would not be allowed to forget it. He wonld be 
given every conceivable stimulus to remember 
it, to revise it, to organize it, to weave it into 
the gromng life of his college achievement. 
His tests of proficiency wonld not come merely 
after each conrse is done ; bnt, before he is given 
his degree, he wonld be asked to give a final 
acconnt of himself, — ^an account which wonld 
insure not only that he has retained the essen- 
tials of his subjects, but that he has learned 
their larger meanings and has attained some 
little initiative in thinking in their terms. And 
out of such organization in his education would 
come that instinct for organization which is 
essential to the genius of any modem social 
order, particularly his American own. 

The ready objection to such a program for 
education is that it is pedagogically unwise. 
Instead of educating the student through his 
interests, it forces him to conform to a regime 
that ignores, or utterly quenches his own spon- 
taneous desires. 

To say this involves two serious misappre- 
hensions. First, a misapprehension concerning 

108 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

what our prevailing system of college education 
actually does to the interests of the average 
youth; and, second, what a sound pedagogical 
doctrine of interest really means.; 

If there is conceivable any sure way of throt- 
tling the student ^s natural interests, our present 
scheme of college education furnishes that way, 
in spite of all pretensions to modern psycho- 
logical method, and in spite of even the elective 
system. That the elective system, as tradi- 
tionally administered, does not educate in terms 
of the student's vital interests, but chiefly in 
terms of his accidental interests, has been re- 
ferred to. And if the foisting of purposes upon 
the student is psychologically a mistake, then 
the foisting of the scholarship purpose upon 
him is a much worse error than the foisting of 
any other purpose upon him would be ; for it is 
the one purpose most foreign to the things he 
deems worth while. 

What sane thing does education, in terms of 
interests, really mean? 

It means that college education in the service 
of a purpose will not at all force that purpose 
upon the student, in spite of his interests. But 
if the purpose of education be the right one, 

109 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

it will accord with these interests; and will 
elicit them, and strengthen them, and make them 
more effective. It will not force interests but 
will select them. This is true education: to de- 
fine and strengthen desires worth while; and to 
teach the sure means of their fulfillment. In 
the process, it discourages interests not worth 
while. Education is the teaching of right wants 
and of how to get them. Such education com- 
bines efficiently the seemingly contradictory 
values of initiative and discipline ; the student 
shall be led to discipline himself through the 
wants which, by initial encouragement from 
without, he at length recognizes as his very own. 
The student is in a measure of bondage so that 
eventually he may be truly free. At present, 
the student ^s boasted freedom inerrantly leads 
to the paradoxical bondage of caprice. 

The American college, once recognizing its 
obligation to the social order, would help the 
student to translate facts into values. If educa- 
tion is, indeed, the double function of teaching 
right wants and how to get them, it might, at 
first, seem a logical result to make a funda- 
mental division of studies into those that reveal 
the ideals of education and life, on the one hand ; 

110 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

and those that lend the skill to achieve them, on 
the other. But this would be a mistake. Every 
study, rightly taught, should be viewed from 
both its ideal and utilitarian sides. Further 
than this, the educator should freely recognize 
that, while every study possesses these two func- 
tions, some subjects preponderately serve one 
rather than the other. For instance, literature, 
ethics, history and government are preponder- 
ately studies that reveal ends; while physics, 
chemistry, biology and the natural sciences in 
general — and the vocational sciences, in par- 
ticular — are primarily studies of skill by which 
ends may be achieved. The educator should 
manage these subjects for the curriculum with 
a full consciousness of these values. Above all, 
he should correct any tendency to make para- 
mount skill or efficiency for its own sake. Skill, 
efficiency, should be ever succinctly subservient 
to the training in the purposes they serve, and 
to which the college is dedicated; else skill is 
empty, and efficiency abortive. 

Finally, the college of to-morrow will let a 
broad ethical culture assume a new place in lib- 
eral education. This essay has maintained that 
the national consciousness that is to motive edu- 

111 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

cation should be thongM of as a supreme obliga- 
tion; which is another way of saying that the 
national ideal is a moral ideal, as well. If it is 
fit to be the American ideal at all, it can be 
nothing else than the goal and the standard of 
the right, written large. It is not that the state 
creates right and wrong; that is too near the 
recent German idea to suit ns. It means, rather, 
that in a democracy the conception of what is 
right creates the state, together with its world- 
view; else it is utterly defenseless. 

Now, it happens that both the individual and 
the nation need a faith in moral verities, as 
never before. The individual needs it, because 
the break-down of dogmatic standards has not 
yet been superseded by standards rationally 
defensible. The result is a wide-spread moral 
scepticism, — b, belief that, to those truly enlight- 
ened, morals are only matters of custom, after 
all ; or that, at best, they are to be resolved to 
maxims of prudence. The nation, too, needs a 
rational moral faith at this time ; for it is living 
in an era of momentous decisions, which need 
adequate criteria to assure their wisdom and 
their righteousness. 

If this be so, the problem of moral education 
112 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

is imperative, much as "we may dislike it and 
all the tribe of vagaries it has involved in the 
past. Certainly, it is the most vexations prob- 
lem educators have, when they recognize it as 
a problem at all. For some time, at least in 
onr larger universities, we have let the prob- 
lem drop, hoping that it would take care of 
itself; or, claiming that it is not the genuine 
business of the college anyway. But this moral 
aloofness of the college has tended to breed 
moral indifference in the student ; and moral in- 
difference begets, in turn, moral scepticism; and 
moral scepticism is dangerous to any man, espe- 
cially to an educated man; and particularly 
dangerous to a democracy. Not only has the 
college bred moral indifference; its emphasis 
of facts over values, and of natural science as 
the only method of substantiating ^^facts,^' has 
tended to positive moral disbelief; which is pre- 
cisely the most unfortunate result, for both so- 
ciety and the individual, that education could 
achieve. 

Many educators have been conscious oi this 
result, and have deplored it. Methods of moral 
education have been suggested, especially for 
the elementary and the high schools, where the 

113 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

deficiency is most felt; but most of these meth- 
ods have proved only moderately successful. 
Courses in ethical theory are too abstracted 
from life, and may lead the student to become 
expert in moral sophistry. Courses in prac- 
tical morals tend to become courses in moraliz- 
ing — a sort of thing which healthy youths dis- 
like above all. Other solutions have the fatal 
defect of rendering morals a sort of appendage 
to life, rather than life itself ; or of making it a 
particular study coordinate with other studies, 
such as physical geography and history. 

The first requirement for the adequate solu- 
tion of the problem of moral education is to 
relieve morals of its false isolation from every- 
thing else, as though it were something by itself. 
It is life ; not an annex to Uf e. It is not to be 
put into any one course. It must be a result 
attained by the whole process of education.; 
The problem is not to introduce a thing called 
morals into education; the problem is to make 
education moral. Yet this, too, is misleading; 
for the word *^ moral'' has been narrowed too 
much, and awakes prejudices that are quite 
justified, considering the narrow and negative 
and repressive and unhuman and unwelcome 

114 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

thing this mnch-abnsed word has grown to mean. 
The truly moral is that which we truly value. 
It stands for lifers supreme values, — ^the things 
we deem most worth while, when we are best 
aware of lifers larger meanings. Applied to a 
given society, the moral is, in the last resort, 
the fulness of the ideal toward which that so- 
ciety struggles, and in terms of which it judges 
its progress. For all progress is moral prog- 
ress, if it is progress at all; and all ultimate 
ideals are moral ; or they have no authority over 
us men who, in the last measure, find ourselves 
justifying our sterner deeds by their righteous- 
ness, — their tendency to attain an end accounted 
supremely good. 

Moral education is relieved from its false 
isolation if we make this ideal of social progress 
the criterion of obligation; in terms of which 
social institutions are organized and main- 
tained, inclnding the institution of education. 
College education in America becomes moral 
when it is consciously in the service of a moral 
obligation, conceived as a nation's obligation 
toward itself and toward the world. This is not 
a vague thing, or an impractical thing, or an 
unprecedented thing. Attention has already 

115 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

been called to the fact that during the World 
War, America possessed a definite national 
consciousness; it was an emphatically moral 
conscionsness as well. Our diplomatic pro- 
nouncements before w^e entered the war were in 
terms of this; and it was in view of its sig- 
nificance that we joined onr allies, and gave of 
onr substance and onr sons. Our patriotism 
was keyed to this. Our splendid morale was 
largely a faith in the moral rightness of this 
American ideal. In the war, ^^ morale ^^ meant 
a number of conflicting things; but the morale 
that defeated Germany was the morale that a 
great French philosopher, Bergson, and a great 
French general, Foch, identified with moral 
faith. The American ideal may seem vague to 
many; but, strange to say, it was definite 
enough, with its international implications and 
obligations, accurately to motive Americans part 
in the subtle and exacting decisions at the 
world's peace table. If accurate and authori- 
tative enough for this, the same social and po- 
litical purpose might seem accurate and authori- 
tative enough for American education to con- 
sider it. 
Should the American ideal gain this author- 
116 



SOME NEXT THINGS 

ity, not one course, bnt the entire college cnr- 
ricnlnm would be a moral training, in the large 
sense and in the only desirable sense. And, as 
already shown, the curriculum, thought of in 
this definite way, involves educational results, 
every one of them of tremendous moral value, 
— discipline of purposes, rather than their ca- 
price; initiative, from which purposes are se- 
lected ; organization ; continuity, or persistence ; 
thinking in terms of values first, and of facts 
afterwards; thinking in terms of an absolute 
value, above all values, destroying mere moral 
relativity and indifference and scepticism and 
unbelief. Our students strikingly lack these 
very qualities. The American social structure 
imperatively needs them in its educated men. 

Such are a few of the next things in American 
college education, viewed as an obligation to the 
American order. There are a great many more. 
But before we can determine them with any 
assurance, we must first ask a question that can 
no longer be postponed. 

What is America? 



THE MEAKTISTG OF AMERICA 

If the American social order is to become 
the efficient motive of education, it is imperative 
that it be conceived as just as definite as it 
actually is. America must be defined to herself 
with some such concreteness as a vocation, as 
engineering or law is defined to itself; defin- 
itely enough, that is, to become a specific goal ; 
definitely enough to organize knowledge, all the 
resources of scholarship, into practical wis- 
dom. Upon this the future of the college de- 
pends. 

The efficient disclosure of what America really 
means is the next supreme task of educators. 
It is a formidable task, a well nigh impossible 
task, — surely a task that will never be more than 
approximately done, since there are no static 
goals of social progress. And mere approxi- 
mations, however exact, do not please either 

118 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

the academic or the technical mind, with their 
common love of closed and finished concepts. 
Bnt essential tasks for the future of education 
are not to be abandoned because formidable, or 
complex, or even endless. Education is a prob- 
lem as large, as complex, and as endless as life; 
and it cannot be treated as small and simple 
and circumscribed. And the task of interpret- 
ing America to herself for educational purposes 
must be done by the educator himself, who com- 
mands the technique indispensable for it. 

Now, since in education as in everything else, 
it is easier to propose problems than to solve 
them; easier to suggest an ideal than to define 
it, there comes at this point the inevitable chal- 
lenge to the writer. Why don't you define it 
yourself? You have complained that other edu- 
cational ideals are vague; well, show us that 
this ideal of yours is any clearer. You have 
said that the American social order was the 
initial motive of American education and the 
inspiration of the common school movement; 
yet you confessed that this motive was gradu- 
ally abandoned, because too nebulous for effi- 
ciency. Show us that this nebulosity was not an 
inherent defect of such an ideal. Yon have a2> 

119 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

gued that a definition of the American social 
order is possible ; well, if it is so easy, make the 
definition a fact. So far, your postponement 
of such a definition looks snspicionsly like an 
evasion. 

Now, my general thesis would stand, even if 
I could not, or would not, attempt further to 
define the American social order. The omission 
of such a task here, or by me anywhere, is not 
a proof that it cannot be done and should not be 
done, in the interests of the future of Amer- 
ican education. To argue thus would be to 
commit a most arrant ignoratio elencM. But 
there is not the slightest doubt that it is better 
to accept the challenge, and to support my con- 
viction that the motive for education can be 
defined, by making the attempt myself, however 
inadequate it may turn out to be. Such an at- 
tempt, at the least, will have the merit of re- 
vealing more clearly what I mean by the Amer- 
ican social order as a motive for education ; and 
it may suggest what essentials a definition of it 
must fulfill, in order to be genuinely effective. 

For any person to attempt to interpret the 
American social order in detail would demand 
many pages, if not many books. However, for 

120 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

the purpose of this essay, an outline of snch 
an interpretation is proffered. It may be 
thought of, if the reader pleases, as a sort of 
epitome of some imaginary book, which may 
be written some day by somebody. Naturally, 
such an epitome will state results, rather than 
the arguments by which they are reached ; and, 
for our purpose, only those aspects of the Amer- 
ican ideal will be stressed as ought to have 
some bearing upon the college ; and yet which, 
thus far, have not been sufficiently effective in 
shaping its educational policy. 

But, while brevity involves a certain dog- 
matism in our exposition, it is advisable to state 
the method by which we may conceive our re- 
sults to have been attained. For the danger is 
that we shall start with some preconceived 
theory of what America is or ought to be, and 
then that we shall proceed to twist our facts 
to fit our theory. Such a procedure is easy ; but 
it has been done so often that it is no longer 
worth while. How shaU we guard against such 
an empty dogmatism? 

First of all, why not let Ajnerica speak for 
herself? For over a century, the American 
people have been interpreting themselves 

121 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

through their deeds, through their institutions, 
and by means of state documents and the public 
utterances of their acknowledged leaders. 
There has been time enough and there have been 
occasions enough for the American people to 
have expressed, quite specifically, what they are 
and what they intend to be. They have created 
a constitution, and have gradually refashioned 
it; they have waged several wars, whose issues 
involved wide-spread and often heated discus- 
sions concerning the American ideal ; they have 
voiced their opinions upon the issues of thirty- 
odd presidential elections, when their political 
parties have fought among themselves for the 
monopoly of all their country ^s virtues; they 
have engaged in countless state, county and 
municipal campaigns, which defined and rede- 
fined and immediately demanded an American 
millenium; every day they read vigilant news- 
papers, responsive to every slightest variation 
in the public pulse, discussing freely and from 
aU points of view Americans responsibilities, 
her failures, and her hopes. It would be stupid 
of us if, with all these means of expression at 
command, we could not discover a few of the 
fundamental attributes which have accrued irre- 

122 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

vocably to the American conception of tlie social 
order, — enough attributes to create a very 
definite educational obligation towards its liv- 
ing purposes. 

A study, by such a method, of what America 
means soon reveals a current fallacy that the 
American ideal is to be thought of as solely, 
or chiefly, political. It is natural that the aver- 
age American should tend to identify America 
with a form of government. He has been 
brought up to do so ; and his patriotic traditions 
have taken that meaning. Yet, of course, Amer- 
ica is infinitely more than a form of govern- 
ment; indeed, its form of government is only 
one corollary of the more fundamental ideals 
for which America exists. Quite possibly, it 
is this ready identification of the American ideal 
with the political ideal that has led many edu- 
cators to feel that education, in its terms, is 
too narrowing a function for a college of liberal 
arts. The slogan of ' ' education for citizenship ' ' 
tends to have this merely political connotation; 
and, while indispensable in its place, is not 
broad enough to embrace more than a few of the 
legitimate aims of the college. It is in this sense 
that the educator may truly feel that, while 

123 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

tlie soldier may well die for political ideals, 
yet education must be for that something larger 
wMch political institutions only help to make 
possible. 

Let us, once and for all, abandon this nar- 
rower interpretation of America, both na- 
tionally and internationally. America is not 
only, or even chiefly, a political order; it is a 
social order. And a careful scrutiny of this 
social order reveals that America stands not 
only for a distinct ideal of the state, but for a 
'distinct interpretation of what human persons 
are and what they may become; which in turn 
means a distinct interpretation of social groujy- 
ing ; a distinct criterion for the justification and 
growth of the institutions of economics ; a dis- 
tinct motive for literature and the arts ; a dis- 
tinct setting and service and hope for religion ; 
and, most certainly, a distinct ideal of inter- 
national and inter-racial rights and obligations- 
Sudh things are not mere vagaries. They are 
the most living things we Americans possess. 
And it would be preposterous to suppose that, 
with distinct ideals of all these phases of life, 
America would involve no distinct ideals of edu- 
cation. Indeed, what must be shown next is that 

124 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

every one of these ideals that have been named, 
as weU as their total meaning taken together, 
has a direct bearing upon our colleges, — if they 
are to recognize their obligation to the Amer- 
ican social order as real. 

What is America? There have arisen scores 
of definitions of it. Students of the social and 
political sciences have been proposing them 
from time to time. But these definitions vary 
surprisingly. Perhaps it is safe to say that 
nearly every one of them contains an element 
of truth. But if this is so, there must be some 
one conception adequate enough to contain and 
conciliate them all. What is this conception? 

The basal fact of any civilization is the view 
it holds of the nature and value of human per- 
sons. The meaning of a social order is validly 
determined only from this. Out of some view 
of what a human being really is evolve all a 
civilization's institutions, social and political; 
and in this lies the secret of their ultimate 
triumph or defeat. For history has its logic, 
and the major premise of this logic is forever 
what this nation or that has to say about what 
men are and may become. And this logic is 
inexorable. Given a civilization that founds its 

125 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

fortunes upon an insufficient view of what men 
really are, and none of its triumphs can deceive 
its certain doom. Now, the struggles of the 
American order imply the latest word and the 
most adequate word with regard to what human 
beings mean. It is the logical and inevitable 
product of that progress in the fortunes of the 
person which is history's real significance. 

The American social order implies, first of 
all, that persons are social. It stands for the 
realization of the individual through society, 
and of society through the individual, and it 
calls upon history to prove that the welfare of 
neither can be sundered from the welfare of 
the other. And, since men are inalienably 
social, their social rights are not regarded as 
artificial, but are as inalienable as are their 
social obligations, — and no more so. And, in 
this, America is psychologically, yes, morally 
sound. 

Educationally, this social interpretation of 
the person should mean significant things for 
the college. The American college should train 
the student's interests so that they will ulti- 
mately and freely coincide with the needs and 
ideals of the social institutions into which his 

126 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

life is to be cast. In the earlier stages of edu- 
cation, there should be an abundant, although 
judicious, discipline of individual caprice ; a dis- 
cipline which, in the elementary and high 
schools, may seem a limitation of freedom ; but 
which, in the college, should surely unfold itself 
as truest self-realization ; the discovery and the 
living thrill of that larger social self which it 
is the college's business to make real in the 
mind of youth. Nor may the college sacrifice 
this social freedom to such irrational freedom 
as often goes by the mistaken name of student 
democracy, and which sometimes degenerates 
into a sort of educational Bolshevism. Student 
democracy the American college must certainly 
have ; but student democracy can never be that 
complete democracy for which it is the college's 
function to train its men. It must ever be a 
reasonably limited democracj^^, for the sake of 
insuring its ultimate social sanity. 

Second, the American consciousness seems to 
imply the bold conviction that persons are price- 
less, — ^not things to be used and valued in finite 
degrees, but the veritable ends for which all 
uses exist; and so the criteria of every value 
under the sun. 

127 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

In college education, this conception of the 
infinite worth of the person, if once realized, 
wonld be revolutionizing, and would tend to 
that very transformation of the academic which 
I have insisted upon. The aim of education 
would be no longer the amassing of information, 
but the stimulating of a type of men. When a 
man graduated, the college would no longer 
ask, chiefly, What has he learned? but, What 
has he become? 

Third, American democracy not only implies, 
but openly proclaims that persons, being price- 
less, are absolutely equal, as persons. This 
equality has been America's perpetual challenge 
to the world. 

Does this involve anything for the American 
college? It certainly does involve something 
toward which American education has been 
tending steadily, — ^an equality of educational 
opportunity, which must now be extended to the 
college as well as to the elementary and sec- 
ondary schools. This does not mean the ab- 
surdity that everyone should have a college edu- 
cation (we need a new heaven and a new earth 
for that, as well as a new college) ; but it does 
mean that everyone should have a chance to 

128 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

obtain it, — the only limit to the chance being 
one ^s own abilities. It is no denial of snch edn- 
cational equality for the college to insist npon 
high standards for those who enter its gates; 
indeed, snch an insistence encourages the very 
abilities which the college should stimulate for 
democracy's safety and progress. 

Fourth, when American democracy proclaims 
persons to be equal, it is, quite evidently, con- 
sidering persons not in terms of what they are 
at any given moment, but in terms of what they 
may become. At any finite moment, they are 
limited in attainments and vary greatly in 
these; but as possibilities they are to be con- 
sidered as equal. No one has a right to set a 
limit to what a person may become. Persons 
are measureless in capacities. The evidence of 
the ready acceptance of this doctrine by Amer- 
icans is easily found. Americans are not ready 
to put final limitations upon the possibilities of 
any man. The newsboy may become President ; 
and the President, in turn, has his future. The 
national optimism is another reflection of this 
same dynamic point of view. The vista of 
America's future growth is endless. No goal 
of progress shall be final. Even the Constitu- 

129 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

tion is to be taken in the spirit, not in the letter; 
it is no longer a final achievement, bnt a proph- 
ecy. Democracy is engaged in a ^^ creative 
evolution/^ for which no trinmph is the last. 

It follows that, for the American college, the 
ideal of what is an educated man can be no set 
product, static and precisely definable. Amer- 
ica knows no educated men, but only men in 
the infinite process of being educated. For an 
American to ^^ finish'^ his education is a pre- 
sumptuous absurdity. This dynamic view of 
men involves just that revolution of the aca- 
demic already hinted; namely, that the college 
teacher is successful only as he encourages the 
young American to make his measureless possi- 
bilities function by acquiring right wants, 
equally measureless, so that they become his im- 
perative demands upon the world and himself. 
He shall be educated in English, say, not merely 
by having read the classics, but by having at- 
tained a living desire for the literature of the 
masters and for a mastery of expression in his 
own tongue. So with any other subject; a dy- 
namic view of life implies a dynamic view of 
education for it. 

Fifth, the American insists that he is free. 
130 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

He does not mean that that he is free to do as 
he pleases, regardless of his fellows. This 
would be the freedom of anarchy. A true man 
of democracy repudiates a freedom of selfish- 
ness, which would disintegrate the very democ- 
racy that he professes as his ideal. Freedom 
must be a social freedom. So, the freedom of 
the American democracy can mean nothing 
more or less than the freedom to seek the social 
goal, in accordance with the reason of each, hut 
voluntarily and freely subject to the revision 
of all. True, freedom is the power to get one's 
wants fulfilled, to realize oneself; but we have 
already seen that the self of American democ- 
racy is a social self; and its most selfish want 
is, inalienably, the social good. 

For the American college, freedom means, 
beyond its social obligations already stressed, 
that men develop only through self-develop- 
ment; that all thoughts that a man can think, 
or deeds that he can do, that are worth anything 
to himself, are thoughts that he thinks for him- 
self and deeds that are bom of his ovvti convic- 
tions. In recent college education, this doctrine 
of self-activity has been increasingly recog- 
nized. Democracy in education means that the 

131 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

individnal is educated from "within, not from 
without ; that, in the last issue, he is led to edu- 
cate himself. More and more we realize that 
what the student accepts upon mere authority 
is worthless, even though it be the bold and 
noble outlines of an Aristotle ^s scheme of things 
entire. More and more we realize that y/hat 
the student learns through his own thinking is 
of infinite value, even though it be the common- 
place detail of a butterfly ^s wing. In general, 
teachers are learning to lead the more mature 
student to the sources, even if the leading be, 
at first, through books about the sources. The 
laboratory method, where the student learns 
through his own labor, is spreading from the 
physical sciences to the social and political 
sciences. The one thing of all others to be 
taught the student is the adoption of the evalu- 
ating attitude toward all his lectures, his books 
and his facts. Democracy, with its insistence 
upon free self-activity, is making of the college 
a great laboratory, whose best instruments each 
student brings with him in his powers of ori- 
ginal thinking, and whose product he finds in 
that self of his that goes out to the tasks of 
the world, 

132 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

Finally, freedom involves a further attribnte 
of democracy's person, too little stressed by the 
theorists of democracy. The freedom or right to 
govern oneself implies the ability so to do. Now, 
the ability to govern oneself is the capacity to 
arrive at reasoned convictions. In other words, 
the doctrine of democracy implies the far-reach- 
ing assumption that in each of its individuals 
is the source of truth; that its members are 
fundamentally rational; that they do not need 
to rely upon mere authority for their conclu- 
sions. They are not only free, but rationally 
free. Popular sovereignty is defensible uj)on 
no other basis. True, at any period of democ- 
racy's growth, individuals will vary greatly in 
their capacities to attain reasoned conclusions 
on matters of social welfare ; but, only by hav- 
ing the right and responsibility of registering 
such convictions equally with others, can their 
power to find truth ever be stimulated. 

The American college should retain and re- 
emphasize, as one of its central purposes, the 
training of the power to reason. Courses in 
logic will not suffice, although a good course in 
logic may well be indispensable. Nor, as I have 
already pointed out, mil it suffice merely to 

133 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

continue the emphasis which the college has 
made npon mere rational analyzing and ab- 
stracting. What is needed is the ability to 
reason not merely with abstract concepts, bnt 
to reason in, through and around living prob- 
lems, especially the concrete problems of social, 
political and moral import; the ability not to 
think logic, bnt to think logically ; which means 
to think with precision, with sustained appli- 
cation, and that continnity which rests not nntil 
an issne is solved, if it is solvable, even thongh 
it never be completely solved; to think with a 
wide grasp, and a power of organization of 
manifolds into unities., To be able to think 
thus, to some appreciable degree, should be one 
of the essential marks of the college man in 
such a social order as ours. 

Such are some of the meanings of the human 
person, implied in the more common preten- 
sions of the American social order. Let us be 
thoroughly aware that the educational corol- 
laries named by the way are quite as general 
as are the social principles passed in review. 
More specific implications for the college will 
naturally come later, when we analyze the sev- 
eral concrete institutions of American life. 

134 



THE MEANING OF AMERICA 

And now note that it is only by viewing men 
and women in these fundamental ways stressed 
by America that the free and rational pursuit 
of ideals, educational or otherwise, is possible 
at all. For the sake of making ideals possible 
was the American order bom! Men created 
it to give themselves a chance, for the first time 
in history, to grow toward their full stature — 
to live in the largest sense of living. For a 
moral ideal is finally worth while to me only 
when it is an infinite possibility; when oppor- 
tunities to attain it are as available to me as 
to any other man, — ^that is, as free as they can 
be ; when I am vindicated as rational, as having 
the source of truth, and so of right action and 
personal initiative, within myself; when I am 
free; when I am of ultimate worth, ultimately 
real, real in my own right. All this the Amer- 
ican order comes to guarantee. It is not merely 
a moral ideal ; the belief in it is the only condi- 
tion of having any moral ideals at all ! 

The foundations of American life are laid. 
What shall be the superstructure? And what 
has the American college to do with it? 



XI 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAIST LIFE 

Out of the American vision of what men are 
and what they may become, evolve all the fun- 
damental expressions of American life; in- 
stinctively, for the most part; and so, subject 
to the devionsness of an experience forever cor- 
recting itself ; but which, correcting itself in 
quite definite ways, reveals that the vision which 
is the soul of its meaning is ever present. 

What are some of these expressions of Amer- 
ican life? And how shall the American college 
adjust itself to them? 

First, there is the American state. The state 
is one of many expressions of the American 
order and exists to guarantee its sure success. 
AH the significant things that belong to po- 
litical America as an ideal are already implied 

136 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

in Americans interpretation of tke nature of 
men and their rights. Thus, the freedom and 
equality that we have found belonging to the 
American theory of the person translate them- 
selves, politically, into self-government, mth 
its freedom and equality of thought, speech, and 
ballot; and of civil and political rights. This 
self-government becomes a government through 
elected representatives for only one reason, — 
it is impracticable for each one of the great 
democracy to govern directly. 

In such a government, the functions of the 
representative are two : To express the people ^s 
will; and to lead it in the light of his unusual 
opportunities for information and wisdom in 
matters of public concern. On the other hand, 
the functions of the citizen are to acquaint him- 
self with the issues that constantly arise for 
his decision ; to express and to discuss his con- 
victions freely with his fellows ; and freely and 
fearlessly to register his convictions through 
the franchise, — ^in other words, to realize his 
rational freedom through a thoroughly con- 
scious political responsibility. 

If we scan American politics as it actually 
is, we find that the citizen has failed and that 

137 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Ms representative has failed qnite notoriously; 
and in ways in which the American college onght 
to be conspicnonsly equipped to remedy. The 
failnre of both the citizen and his represen- 
tative is, first of all, in the lack of expert intel- 
ligence in matters political; both tending to 
substitute for political wisdom an optimistic 
fatalism which is convinced that no possible 
error could ever render American democracy 
anything but triumphant. Add to this our char- 
acteristically American belief, noted the world 
over, that anybody can do anything, particularly 
the deeds involved in all phases of governing. 

Such faith is fatal. The college can correct 
it. Precisely here is where the limited but im- 
portant ideal of ^^ education for citizenship '^ 
finds an indispensable place. A course in the 
American State, including intelligent discussion 
of vital political problems — ^yes, and compara- 
tive government — should be required of every 
American college man. And in all this, the in- 
stitution of American government should not 
1)6 left unrelated to the larger aspects of the 
American social order, whose security and prog- 
ress is its only justification. 

The American college can help America to 
138 



THE COLLEGE AND AMEEICAN LIFE 

redeem a second noteworthy failure of both its 
citizens and politicians; namely, the failure to 
realize government as a social responsibility, 
before which every whit of selfishness must give 
way. The indifference of the citizen to the fran- 
chise ; his submission to the intrenched power of 
the Bosses; his regarding his government as a 
far-away thing, somehow abstracted from his 
private and local concerns, — ^these all are facts ; 
and they are symptoms of an apathy whick 
plays directly into the hands of the politician, 
who, selfish in his own way, makes of the citi- 
zen ^s indifference his own opportunity; abuses 
his function as a representative and ignores his 
responsibilities as a leader; or deliberately takes 
advantage of his inside knowledge to mislead. 
The college can remedy this, too, and in only 
one way. It can remedy it by making its entire 
curriculum and its administration a training for 
the feeling and the conviction of responsibility 
to the social order, including its political insti- 
tution, — a moral responsibility, conceived as the 
supreme business of the educated man ; not as 
a mere incident among the things worth while. 
With the American social order as the aim of 
education, the American state at once becomes 

139 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

an integral part of that living purpose, in terms 
of which college education shall exist. One of 
the most encouraging signs for the future of 
the American state is the increasing emergence 
of college men into expert leadership in po- 
litical life. Education in America may yet be, 
in fact as well as in theory, what our fore- 
fathers wanted it to be, the bulwark of demo- 
cratic government. 

Second, the American order is an economic 
and industrial order. If, in the American con- 
ception, all things must serve the person as the 
ultimate end and criterion of values, so must 
all economic institutions. Verily, there is such 
a thing as economic and industrial democracy, 
— as an ideal. What such economic democracy 
in detail would be is one of the grave questions 
for the educated man to solve, and to solve 
speedily. The question is, certainly, imminent 
and imperative enough. It is going to be an- 
swered in one way or another; quite possibly, 
in the wrong way. The risk is that the more 
pressing economic and industrial questions may 
be decided in one of two equally disastrous 
ways: Either by the one-sided prejudices of 
the wage-earner, through a growing self-con- 

140 



THE COLLEGE AND AMEEICAN LIFE 

scions solidarity, whicli means dictatorsMp, with 
or without violence ; or, by the equally one-sided 
prejudices of the wage-payer, through the adroit 
manipulation of the established order, for which 
he has some genius. Or, a third way is possible, 
— continuous compromises, out of which shall 
emerge again and yet again the everlasting con- 
flict, to be compromised once more. 

The solution of the economic problems of the 
American order cannot rightly come through 
the triumph of the interests of one class, or 
through the compromise of classes. Such solu- 
tions are contradictions to the very being of the 
American order. Virtually, they make large 
bodies of men things to be used, not ends in 
themselves. Such solutions mean the exploita- 
tion of the employer by the employee; or the 
reverse; or both. No, the economic problem 
must be solved, painfully and slowly as you 
please, not by prejudice or by special interests 
on the one side or the other ; but by an impartial 
and expert reason, whose supreme qualification 
is the possession of a standard of values higher 
than the merely economic; and expressive of 
the many-sided good of the social order as a 
whole. Never and nowhere was rational and 

141 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

judicions leadership through conrageous con- 
victions needed more than now and here. It 
is the business of the college to furnish much 
of the material for such leadership, if the col- 
lege be granted to exist for the social order at 
all. And the American college must afford not 
only leaders, but a large body of men who can 
intelligently support intelligent leadership, 
once it appears. Certainly, every American col- 
lege man should have a training in economic 
and industrial fundamentals. But it must not 
be an economics academically taught. I It must 
mean a learning to think in economic terms, 
based upon a conviction of the gravity of the 
economic situation, and stimulated by a sym- 
pathetic knowledge of comparative points of 
view and of contemporary movements of eco- 
nomic import. America and the world seethe 
with such movements now ; the college graduate 
must meet them not indifferently or ignorantly, 
but responsibly and intelligently, — ^which means 
a fundamental recognition of the relation of 
economic values to the other human values for 
which his college exists! Once there was a 
danger that some colleges might find themselves 
indirectly subsidized, to the exclusion of open- 

142 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

mindedness in economic teaching. Bnt this 
danger has been minimized as the academic 
freedom and tenure of the college professor 
have become more and more secnre. Nor may 
it be forgotten that, added to the direct inflnence 
of the college, is the indirect influence of the 
technical schools of our universities, which 
yearly send into the world of economic and in- 
dustrial life trained experts, many of whom have 
taken part of the college course ; including, it is 
to be hoped, some such training in economic 
thinking as I have urged. The indirect influence 
of such men, trained broadly, even if super- 
ficially, in economic questions would be invalu- 
able. 

Third, the American order means a new con- 
ception of social groupings. Most obviously, 
the social theory of our democracy makes a 
system of castes or of semi-castes impossible. 
That is, there can be no group whose existence 
means the possession of valuable and exclusive 
privileges for personal advantage over their 
fellows, and which is not founded upon prin- 
ciples of inclusion for which any person as a 
person may qualify, in time. Thus, there can be 
no aristocracy in the European sense, based 

143 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

upon snch a forbidding barrier as that of birth. 
And this has sometimes been urged against 
American democratic society as a defect. In- 
deed, the innate monotony, the social dead level, 
the spiritless and uninteresting uniformity of 
democratic society (as a theory) often has been 
enlarged upon. We are told that the doctrine 
of social equality inevitably carries with it social 
sameness. 

But the criticism of democracy's society as 
monotonously uniform assumes that the equal- 
ity of democracy prohibits the institution of 
social groups of different grades, mutually ex- 
clusive in any sense. Yet not all social groups 
are castes. And there may be, indeed, a highest 
social group, without its constituting itself an 
aristocracy. 

For, remember that the doctrine of equality 
means that persons are equals as ends — as possi- 
bilities — and that they have freedom, — the free- 
dom to seek their self-realization in the social 
goal, through the reason of each. This social 
goal, this ideal democracy, is theoretically and 
really the same for all. But while all have the 
same ideal; and while, thus, and only thus, is 
the solidarity of democracy secured, not 

144 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

every person is in the same stage of progress 
toward it. Nor have those in the same stage the 
same individual problems to meet, — the same 
interests. Men are, indeed, the same in so far 
as their ideal is the same, and in so far as they 
have eqnal opportnnities for attaining it. But 
men are different in so far as they represent 
different cultural stages toward the ideal, and 
express their individuality by realizing it in 
their own ways. 

Now, men will naturally and reasonably 
group themselves according to their funda- 
mental ^' interests,^' as we say. And the funda- 
mental interest of democracy's man, apart from 
the universally shared interest in the common 
democratic ideal, is his interest in those things 
which appertain to his own stage of self-reali- 
zation toward the social goal. The true prin- 
ciple of fundamental groups in a democracy, 
then, is community in a stage of culture, or of 
progress toivard the common social ideal. This 
has reference to democracy's fundamental 
groups. They are formed on an ethical prin- 
ciple; for democracy is an essentially ethical 
conception. Other social groups may be formed 
upon more superficial bases; but they are not 

145 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

integral parts of the organization of democ- 
racy ^s society, as sucK. And they mnst disap- 
pear if, in principle, they are opposed to it. 

These social gronps of ideal democracy are 
exclusive in the sense that no one is acceptable 
to a group unless he fulfills in himself the quali- 
fications that belong to the sort of culture which 
it represents. These social groups are open 
to all in the sense that any person has within 
himself the capacity for attaining any given 
stage of culture, and so any social group what^ 
ever. Thus, no group of democracy can become 
a fixed aristocracy. One may add that no sane 
man would want to belong to an association of 
person^ whose cultural attainments and inter- 
ests were widely different from his own. 

Further, the spirit of democracy permits no 
snobbishness on the part of any of its social 
groups. A social set might well be formed in 
strict accord with democracy's principles^ and 
yet not truly represent democracy, if its mem- 
bers looked upon persons of less cultural attain- 
ment with the Pharisee's thanksgiving. For, in 
democracy, the social ideal of the member of 
a restricted group is the good not only of his 
kind, but of the whole of society. Should he 

146 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

restrict Ms aim to those of Ms own sort, he 
thereby would turn his back "apon democracy 
and join his fortunes with an abortive aris- 
tocracy. If the masses are not as high as he 
in cultural progress, he will not look down upon 
them with contempt, or pity, or indifference ; his 
aim, even in Ms restricted associations, is to 
put the 'masses in the way of progress, not as 
charity, but as social justice. Thus, the mem- 
bers of a truly democratic social set are not ex- 
clusive, in the sense that they limit all their 
social recognitions to their kind alone. They 
esteem themselves part of the larger society, 
whose obligations are forever prior; and for 
whose obligations, indeed, they are formed into 
a group the better to discharge. 

What can the college do to mold American 
social sets into an approximation to America's 
meaning of a social order? 

Well, first of all, it can attempt to correct the 
obvious shortcomings of American social sets as 
they exist. Best of all, they can do this by 
correcting these same shortcomings within the 
society of the college itself. What are these 
defects that must be minimized within the stu- 
dent's world, for the sake of that later world 

147 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

he is to enter? To put it boldly, how do Amer- 
ican social sets, as they are, sin against democ- 
racy? 

They sin again democracy in so far as they 
do not try to discover their real relation to the 
social order as a whole, and are not fully loyal 
to what they do know. 

They sin against democracy in so far as they 
emphasize exclnsiveness for its own sake; an 
emphasis that is aided and abetted by the in- 
herent and imitative snobbishness of the masses. 

They sin against democracy in so far as they 
emphasize principles of inclusion which are im- 
possible for a person as a person ; such as great 
wealth beyond its cultural worth, and in terms 
of the unjust deprivation of others. 

They sin against democracy in so far as their 
ideal is the welfare of the restricted group, 
rather than that of the total society of which 
they are parts; and in so far as they do not 
make the obligations of this larger society 
strictly prior, and are not grouped for the sake 
of service to it, rather than for selfish glorifica- 
tion. 

They sin against democracy in so far as they 
regard themselves, isolated and apart, as the 

148 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

real Society, over against the masses, who are 
conceived as socially alien. In a democracy, 
there should be no Society, in the insidious 
meaning of Society versus the masses. Any 
person belongs to some social group; each 
gronp, however large or small, however little it 
may mingle with others, being rightly consid- 
ered an integral part of that larger society 
which, alone, is democracy. 

And, finally, onr hedonistic social sets sin 
especially against democracy in so far as they 
tend to become egoistic and nnscrupnlonsly, 
narrowly, self-indnlgent ; and, therefore, deeply 
unsocial, and so undemocratic. 

Thns, through these sins against democracy, 
the conditions of genuine social progress are 
yet far from being fulfilled in America. For, 
again, the democratic ideal of society came into 
being and is justified only because, as far as 
human reason and experience can judge, this 
conception is the only one that secures an in- 
definite and complete social progress, — a prog- 
ress which is ethically real. America has 
adopted democracy ; but society, at least in the 
restricted sense, is not quite loyal to Amer- 
icans cherished hope. 

149 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

This hope may be realized partially -within 
college walls. The defects of the American 
social sets mnst here be corrected as much as is 
practicable, whether expressed in snobbishness 
of family, or wealth, or display, or intellect; 
whether through hedonism, or aimlessness; 
whether incorporated in social cliques, or in 
such forms of fraternities and sororities and 
clubs as defy the American idea. Here in the 
college, if anywhere, should be found at least 
a remote suggestion of the true social ranking. 
But it can exist only if the consciousness of the 
American social order, and the meaning of its 
persons, are introduced to the students^ minds 
not only as a theory, but as an atmosphere. It 
is Utopian to expect too much from the colleges 
in this respect. But it is not Utopian to hope 
and demand something. Above all, no college 
should lend itself, as some few ^^ aristocratic^^ 
colleges certainly have, to the perpetuation of 
those very social distinctions which the Amer- 
ican college should exist emphatically to dis- 
courage. 

Fourth, the American social order has its un- 
mistakable implications in the realm of litera- 
ture and the other arts. A famous musician 

150 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

said, during the World War: ^^It is my convic- 
tion that art has as much at stake in this war 
as democracy/^ His reason was that true art 
depends npon true democracy for its future. 
Since literature is the art most familiar to us, 
and since it ranks high among the arts, we may 
allow it to be representative of the arts for the 
purposes of this discussion. 

Now, that there is possible an art distinctively 
American has been challenged for a number of 
reasons; reasons which, I think, are answer- 
able. In the first place, it is alleged that we are 
guilty of the fallacy of False Cause if we sup^ 
pose that a particular form of government has 
any direct influence upon art. But the question 
is not whether democracy, in the restricted sense 
of democratic government, has any influence 
upon art; but whether democracy, as a theory of 
man and society, exemplified in a total national 
life, has such influence. 

Second, it is argued that America has not yet 
attained a national unity. To this one may 
reply that America is rapidly attaining a unified 
self-consciousness, so far as many of the funda- 
mental meanings of its democracy are con- 
cerned ; that the war has helped to render this 

151 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERI13A 

nnity still more real ; and that even if a national 
nnity were not yet attained, it is a possibility; 
and that art shonld do its unique share to realize 
it. 

Third, it is contended that the modern close 
intercourse of nations tends towards the oblit- 
eration of purely national arts. But the inti- 
mate interrelations of peoples cannot obliterate 
the distinctiveness of America, until all peoples 
adopt the principles of its social order. And, 
even then, the distinctiveness of America will 
richly remain in the uniqueness of the content 
of that order; a content to which I shall pres- 
ently refer. 

Finally, it is urged that true art is universal 
in its nature ; it transcends national boundaries, 
just as true logic is the same logic, regardless 
of places and times. The answer is that the 
formal elements of art are, indeed, universal; 
but that the contentual elements, while distin- 
guishable from form, cannot be sundered from 
form; that democracy is most favorable to a 
sound art, through its insistence upon truth to 
life and the moral values, in terms of persons, 
which any genuine esthetic creation involves. 
Attention should also be called to the fact that, 

152 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

Ibesides furnishing the distinctive content of 
democracy's life as such, America affords the 
dramatic content peculiar to America's own 
specific conditions for democracy's realization. 
This includes such elements as our concrete his- 
torical background and movement; the deter- 
minations of our national life by the vastness of 
the country, sectional differences, oppor- 
tunities for dramatic tendencies counter to 
democracy in^the chances of fortune, and in 
our inherited and borrowed tendencies; and, 
above all, and permeating all, the inevitable 
conflicts, spiritual and material, tragic and 
comic, belonging to a democracy as yet only in 
the earlier stages of being realized. 

The American social order has hardly begun 
to express itself through the arts. Some Amer- 
ican literature has come nearest to such an ex- 
pression, especially such as presents to us an 
apotheosis of the common man and the common 
life, interpretive of their real meanings. Of 
course, the first thing is for the American peo- 
ple to value the arts as worth while; and dis- 
tinctively American art as a desirable possi- 
'Bility. And one of the best ways to achieve this 
is for educational institutions to lay some stress 

153 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

upon the appreciation and creation of the bean- 
tiful. I much fear that this is contrary to the 
main American tradition; certainly, it is con- 
trary to the established tradition of the college. 
And yet, is the assumption of a genuine relation 
between truth and beauty mere sentiment? Is 
there not a real relation, too, between moral and 
esthetic ideals ? "We remember how thoroughly 
Plato thought that there was. 

This is not to argue that the college of arts 
shall be turned into a school of art; to have 
visions of canvasses and easels and long hair 
and Byronic collars and a sublimated Latin 
Quarter. But one may well have a vision of the 
time when, in America, the beautiful shall no 
longer be regarded as merely incidental to life, 
instead of as an important and integral part of 
life itself. "We have the motive of truth in edu- 
cation; in a small measure, too, the motive of 
morals under various guises. There is place 
for the motive of beauty as well. It need not 
and should not be expressed chiefly in special 
courses in esthetics. It can best be expressed 
through the education of the imagination; not 
only through courses in literature, where, how- 
ever, the possibilities are obvious; but through 

154 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

tlie sciences as well. There is richly possible 
such a thing as the nse of the imagination in 
scientific matters; does the stndent ever find it? 
Does the average instructor himself? Whether 
or no the future of American art, including 
literature, depends greatly upon the American 
college, from it might well be expected great 
things. The college will have missed one very 
great phase of its responsibility to the social 
order, if it continues to ignore what is a funda- 
mental note in any completely rounded civi- 
lization. 

Fifth, the American order implies distinct 
ideals of the meaning of religion. Casually^ 
this assertion seems radical, even dangerous. 
It is, if not characterized mth some care. But, 
a fundamental doctrine of what men are, such 
as the American order indubitably affords, can- 
not but have its implications within the realm 
of religion. The pricelessness of the person 
is not only a democratic doctrine, but a reli- 
gious doctrine. So, the social nature of the 
self implies that democracy's person cannot ac- 
cept any religion but one with social responsi- 
bilities; that it cannot be ^^ saved" in terms of 
any selfish hedonism. Again, if democracy's 

155 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

person is fundamentally rational, religion may 
not be considered as remote from other intel- 
lectual interests, including science, wliich often 
seems unwarrantably opposed to it. Further, 
if persons are free, then religion must spring 
from within, however validly it may be stimu- 
lated from without. And, again, if persons are 
measureless in capacities, then religion must 
not be thought of as merely a negative con- 
straint, but as a positive and expanding self- 
realization. 

Such are a few of the religious implications 
of the American social order. Already, the 
churches tend to recognize them. Only such 
religion, whether Christian or Jewish, Catholic 
or Protestant, can furnish an adequate sanction 
for democracy's ethical ideals. 

And such a sanction is needed. Closely allied 
to a healthy moral consciousness, is the religious 
consciousness, — ^the consciousness of those 
verities that strongly support and are logically 
implied by a living moral faith. To fight for 
the right, effectively and hopefully, is to have 
some sort of belief in the triumph of the right, 
which, at any finite moment in human history, 
is never fully victorious; indeed, often appar- 

156 



THE COLLEGE AND AMERICAN LIFE 

ently defeated. It means a living faith in some 
power that makes for righteousness. 

While it is not the business of the non-sec- 
tarian college, with manifest obligations to the 
democracy of thought, to insist upon any too 
particular interpretation of religions verities 
(beyond their general spirit, as Jnst outlined) 
no college should prejudice its youths against 
them, directly or indirectly. Yet, indirectly, 
and wholly unintentionally, this has certainly 
been done. It has been done because the con- 
cepts of physical science, contident through 
their successes over all other methods and con- 
tents of truth, have been taught in such a con- 
text as to insure the corollary of scepticism con- 
cerning the unseen verities. The so-called ^^ ra- 
tionalism'^ of some of our larger colleges is 
mostly the pretension of the natural science 
method to decide all questions ; a pretension of 
concepts to which I have referred, and which 
a new education must controvert. Almost any 
expert in the logic of method knows better; 
but his is a still, small voice, unheeded among 
the more strident achievements which present 
themselves for acclaim in the world of the 
obvious. 

157 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

Such, ' ' rationalism ' \ is irrational. A new em- 
phasis npon the intangible, yet supremely real 
values which all facts must subserve, if they are 
to have the least glimmer of educational mean- 
ing, will involve the resurrection of the age-old 
rights of the realities we are accustomed to call 
** religious ^^ to a consideration at least impar- 
tial. True education may yet mean the reason- 
able transfiguration of life, morally and re- 
ligiously. After the tyranny of an age of 
*^facts,^' -some of earth ^s older glories may 
return to show how indispensable these facts of 
science indeed are; yet, how insufficient they 
ever must be, when left to their own barren ser- 
vices to themselves. 

Education may yet give us not only life's 
reason, but something of its inspiration, too ! 



xn 



THE LAEGEST TERMS OF CULTTJEE 

There may have been growing in the mind 
of the reader a feeling that to conceive of edu- 
cation as motived solely by the social order of 
one^s own particular country is to narrow edu- 
cation unduly, and to be in direct conflict with ' 
the traditional and honored notion of the truly 
educated man. For, has it not always been 
part of our ideal of a man of true culture that 
his sympathies shall embrace all countries and 
times ? That his shall be a cosmopolitan mind, 
a citizen of that world-democracy of thought 
which transcends all interests merely temporary 
and local? Surely it would be a calamity if, for 
this broader notion of culture, should be sub- 
stituted an insular notion. Indeed, would it not 
be very much like the recently deprecated Ger- 

159 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

man idea of culture, which tended to exclude 
all other cnltiires as inferior or negligible, and 
which made education function for that par- 
ticular regime knoAvn as the Grerman state? 
Surely America, of all countries, must not sur- 
render itself to any such narrow view of a lib- 
eral education! 

All this would be a justifiable and even fatal 
criticism were it not that the American social 
order, by its very nature, implies and calls for 
the international order; if the American con- 
sciousness did not mean both a broad interna- 
tional consciousness and an international con- 
science. This international consciousness is im- 
plied, first of all, in America's emphasis upon 
the social nature of the individual, — an em- 
phasis upon the fact that human beings are 
interdependent in all the interests that go to 
make up human welfare, and upon the desira- 
bility of this fact. The fact itself is clear. For 
all that he values most, the modern man must 
rely upon the social institutions of which he 
is a part, and for whose being and progress he 
and his fellows are responsible. His education, 
his pleasures, his economic prosperity, his reli- 
gion ; his literary, artistic and scientific culture, 

160 



THE LARGEST TERMS OF CULTURE 

— all these are social in their nature, and unat- 
tainable save in cooperation with his f ellowmeri. 
This is true for any country deeply concerned 
with twentieth century things; but for Amer- 
icans it is not an accident, but the necessary 
implication of the social nature of men, as ex- 
pressed in the fundamental rights and obliga- 
tions inalienable from the consciousness of an 
American. Now, add that all social institutions 
are, perforce, such that they transcend any and 
all national boundaries ; that every one of them 
is part of an international life; and that, for 
their full development, they demand the inter- 
national consciousness and conscience ; then, at 
once, the truly educated man becomes as cos- 
mopolitan as ever he was — ^yes, more so — for 
now it is not merely a cosmopolitanism of schol- 
arship, although it includes this ; but a cosmo- 
politanism of active aims and imperative 
responsibilities. The educated man becomes a 
citizen of the world in a sense more real than 
ever before ; indeed, real for the first time. And, 
in a large sense, his fellow-citizens belong to all 
ages. In the social order conceived dynam- 
ically, in living relation to past and future, it 
is a liberal fact that Socrates and Dante are his 

161 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

compatriots in the only actual republic of minds 
which embraces all spaces and all times. So 
the educated man shall not neglect the eternal 
things that make plausible the high motive of 
truth for truth ^s sake, the ideals of liberal cul- 
ture and of disinterested thinking. Let us not 
forget this. 

Or, if you please, an international and inter- 
racial consciousness just as truly follows from 
the American notion of freedom, which is 
a freedom at once rational and social. Demo- 
cratic freedom — ^the freedom to seek the social 
goal — cannot be arrested at geographical 
points. It becomes a doctrine meaning a world- 
goal, or it contradicts itself. The liberty of the 
individual interprets the liberty of the group, 
even if the group be called a nation. America 
proclaims that there is only one liberty of na- 
tions and races, as well as of individuals, — the 
liberty that is thoroughly social ; the liberty of 
each nation to seek the international goal, in 
accordance, indeed, with the reason of each na- 
tion, but voluntarily and freely subject to the 
revision of all. National aims mean interna- 
tional aims; national responsibilities mean 
international responsibilities; a national con- 

162 



THE LAEGEST TERMS OF CULTURE 

science means an international conscience; na- 
tional democracy means international democ- 
racy. The educated man wonld not be educated 
without this international mind. 

So it is the business of the American college 
to train men for the world-order, not in spite 
of its responsibilities to the American order, 
but because of them. Fortunately, the issues 
of the World War have given an invaluable 
stimulus to the international spirit among 
Americans. Never before has the average man 
of any country so had his vision widened by 
a compelled attention to the questions of inter- 
national welfare and ideals. Every phase of 
the fundamental principles involved in the rela- 
tions of nations and of races and of cultures 
has been emphasized and brought to his notice, 
and has become part of his daily thought and 
conversation. This daily reaction upon a great 
international situation is, perhaps, the most 
pervasive and important educational force 
that has ever molded the popular mind of any 
country. It will contribute mightily to the for- 
mation of the character of the American, not 
only of this generation, but of the future. 

The continuation of this stimulus to inter- 
163 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

national thinking mnst be snstained by Amer- 
ican educational institutions, not only in the 
interests of culture, but in the interests of the 
immediate issues of world-reconstruction. 
Here, the responsibilities of the college are un- 
deniable. The project of a League of Nations 
means the vital need of training for world- 
citizenship. And if, by any chance, the project 
should fail, the absence of such a formal recog- 
nition of international responsibilities renders 
such a training even more imperative. While 
the war has done much to lead the American to 
international thinking, his traditions are very 
much against it ; and these traditions are likely 
to gain a hazardous ascendency at a critical 
time. We Americans are, traditionally, in- 
tensely patriotic, intenselv nationalistic; as we 
may well continue to be. But, as a people, we 
tend to think that, somehow, nationalism and 
internationalism are irreconcilable; that pat- 
riotism means not only my country, but my 
country against the world. Incidentally this 
was the way a certain recent imperial foe of 
democracy led his people to conceive patriotism. 
Such a conception of national interests is not 
worthy of perpetuation. The American college 

164 



THE LAEGEST TEEMS OF CULTUEB 

may well lend its influence toward creating- 
minds that see clearly that there need be na 
conflict at all between enlightened national 
patriotism on the one hand, and loyalty to the 
great world-interests on the other; that an en- 
lightened patriotism not only tolerates but sel- 
fishly demands world-rights and world-duties; 
that no individual nation need lose its national 
integrity, any more than our individual states 
lose their integrity, although federated for the 
common weal; that variety and unity may go 
together, must go together, if the highest things^ 
of human welfare are to be conserved. 

In what ways may the college educate toward 
this international mindedness? 

There should be more international confer- 
ences on education, and more international edu- 
cational cooperation ; perhaps, even, an interna- 
tional bureau of education. The international 
interchange of professors should be encouraged 
as never before, and in a more universal and 
systematic way. The international interchange 
of students is just as important; although the 
tendency, for some time, is likely to be a stress 
upon American education for Americans. This 
stress is correct enough, within measure; but 

165 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

it ehonld not exclnde study abroad by Amer- 
ican stndents, who will both help and be helped 
by the contact with alien cultures. We should 
encourage students of other nations to come to 
American colleges; not only for their own 
sakes, but for the sake of ourselves. Cosmo- 
politan clubs mthin our colleges should be en- 
couraged, and should yield a more wide-spread 
influence than in the past. Within the region 
of each social science taught to undergraduates, 
some attention might well be paid to contem- 
porary social movements in other nations ; na- 
tions which, thereby, shall not be thought of as 
merely governments, but as fellow-peoples, with 
fundamental interests and struggles very like 
our own ; and upon the success of which our own 
success is dependent. With the spread of 
democracy, it is to be hoped that the study of 
countries will become more and more the study 
of men and women ; not chiefly of their political 
machinery. The study of American history 
should make clear just what our living Amer- 
ican culture owes to the cultures of other peo- 
ples, living and dead. And the study of history 
and of the social sciences in general should be 
^o managed that the student shall not know 

166 



THE LARGEST TERMS OF CULTURE 

more of dead civilizations than of the living civi- 
lizations with which he is in living relation, if he 
really lives at all. A conrse in at least one 
modern language shonld be required, and re- 
quired to the extent that it will lead to a reading 
knowledge of some of its literature. The mod- 
ern language clubs, now so prevalent in our 
colleges, may well be used as valuable educa- 
tional adjuncts for the purpose of discussing 
foreign contemporary life, and of becoming 
somewhat acquainted with the leading foreign 
journals of opinion. 

These are merely a few suggestions. But, 
however it shall be accomplished, the American 
college will not have fulfilled its obligation to 
the American social order until it yields, as its 
type of the educated man, a mind that has 
begun to feel its cultural and moral relations 
to the world-currents of its time, and of all 
times. 

We are now ready for a larger educational 
implication of the American order, taken as a 
whole. In a previous discussion, there was sug- 
gested the institution of correlation-courses in 
the latter years of the college course. We now 
have the material of such a correlation-course 

167 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

ready to hand. For, not only the teacher, bnt 
the stndent mnst be aware of the larger aims 
of his own college culture. They can be com- 
municated through a course which will include 
and, in a broad way, interrelate the various 
sides of American life which have been re- 
viewed, — political, economic, social, esthetic, 
moral and religious; yes, and international. 
Such a course might be entitled Present Day 
Institutions, or American Civilization, or Amer- 
ican Ideals. It should be given cooperatively 
by the departments concerned. A correlation 
like this does not mean an impossible mastery 
of all the subjects related. But it would give 
the student definite encouragement to relate his 
subjects in a living way ; and it would communi- 
cate to him a breadth of vision that would trans- 
figure his entire education. Incidentally, such 
a course would be one practical means of en- 
larging the vision of the teacher, through his 
cooperation with his colleagues in creating such 
a perspective of the concrete life for which the 
college exists. An earlier and preparatory sort 
of correlation-course could be made in conjunc- 
tion with classes in English composition. The 
themes of composition could be vitalized by 

168 



THE LARGEST TERMS OF CULTURE 

making them such problems as require a modest 
synthesis of those fields of knowledge which the 
student's education has thus far given him; and 
which especially suggest the problems that are 
to become more and more imperative, as the 
motives of his later education. 

Bu.t there is another medium of correlation 
suggested by a final question which might well 
be asked concerning the American democracy. 
We started out with the problem of discover- 
ing national ideals, the ideals of the American 
people as a whole, expressed in their popular 
institutions. Yet, just beneath the surface, we 
have been dealing, all along, with the kinds of 
ideal selves that individuals, rather than nations 
as such, seek as their moral goals. For a so- 
ciety has no ideals at all save those which are 
formed by the individuals that comprise that 
society. A social ideal is nothing more or less 
than the purpose which its individuals have in 
getting together. The ideal is ever the ideal 
of individuals ; a social ideal is simply that ideal 
in terms of which individuals, inalienably social, 
cooperate. 

Thus, the ultimate purpose of every people, 
whether or not it is fully aware of it, is to make 

169 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

possible a certain kind of life in a certain kind 
of society; in other words, to achieve the preva- 
lent ideal of what men onght to be, the life they 
onght to live and have a right to live. In this 
sense, what are the reasons which jnstify Amer- 
icans institutions, — ^her politics, her form of 
social groupings, her literature, her schools and 
colleges, her predominant religious tendencies? 
What sort of American are we trying to de-^ 
velop, or, at least, tending to develop between 
these seas? From the analysis of the American 
social order and its theory of the person, we 
already know that he is priceless ; social ; free ; 
equal ; measureless in capacities. But measure- 
less in capacities for what? So far, we have 
only the indispensable conditions for his self- 
realization; but what sort of person will the 
American be when he does adequately realize 
himself? 

Do not forget that he is rational. Perhaps 
this is his salvation. For, among all ideals pos- 
sible, surely it is reasonable to suppose that 
only one is preeminently rational. But which 
ideal is it? If the history of civilization is not 
a story of caprice, but of reason unfolding it- 
self, in however tortuous a way, then it is that 

170 



THE LARGEST TERMS OF CULTURE 

one ideal which, is the fullest expression of hn- 
man progress, rightly interpreted. This ideal^ 
whatever it is, has, perforce, been present, 
though unconsciously, from the first, molding 
inexorably the institutions of men. 

But, again, does anybody know just what this 
ideal is? A philosopher may deduce it from 
the possibilities of human nature; but other 
philosophers are likely to disagree with him. 
How far will the ideal American exemplify the 
virtues of the intellect, whether it be that of 
the logician, or the scholar, or the creative 
imagination? How far will he prize the life 
of pleasure? Will his mood reincarnate the 
spirit of the cultured Greek, and discover him 
worshipping at the shrine of Beauty, deifying 
her as the summit of human attainment? "Will 
he have any use at all for asceticism? Or will 
he become a confirmed devotee of such sensa- 
tionalism as to-day characterizes much of our 
popular play and much of our daily reading? 
How far will he glorify the will by aspiring to 
the seats of the mighty? Or, through ^Hhe 
strenuous life f^^ Or, may it be that he will seek 
to fulfill all these parts of life without dis- 
crimination, so far as in him lies? 

171 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

The American social order, as such, cannoii 
iSpeak decisively upon these questions, so subtly 
elusive. Still, it is fairly easy to discover some 
of the things which the ideal American is not, 
according to the popular consciousness. He 
does not value intellect for its own sake, 
whether it be expressed in erudition, in specu- 
lative reason, or in constructive imagination. 
Nor is he a man of feeling, primarily, although 
he is by no means an ascetic. If we seek af- 
tirmative traits, we find that he has an un- 
doubted tendency to stress ^Hhe rounded man,^' 
the virtues of versatility and cosmopolitanism, 
the ideal of fullness of life. And, if there is 
any further decided trait in the ideal Amer- 
ican, it is that of the glorification of the will 
as expressed in deeds, rather than in mere con- 
sciousness of power. Thus, the two chief Aaner- 
ican virtues are optimism and courage. It is 
for the sake of deeds that all intellect exists; 
and, in this service, intellect is priceless ; but in- 
tellect must be pragmatic, or it will be discour- 
aged as indulging in ^^mere theory.'^ It is in 
connection with deeds that feelings and senti- 
ments also find their legitimate place, — such as 
the feeling of pleasure. The supreme pleasure 

172 



THE LAEGEST TEEMS OF CULTUEB 

is that which accompanies action and the sure 
sense of growing accomplishment. 

We need not evaluate this ideal, save to note 
that it, too, is a version of the rounded man, 
who expresses fullness of life ; and so, in abun- 
dant measure, it reveals the decisive demand 
of the American social order that its persons 
shall be social and rational and, thus, genu- 
inely worthy of measureless development. The 
American college will not cast its men in a lesser 
mold. It will discourage all narrow perversions 
of it on the part of its teachers, who, as we have 
seen, tend to the glorification of intellect; par- 
ticularly, the logical and erudite versions of it; 
and it will discourage such perversions on the 
part of the students, who tend toward the glori- 
fication of self-assertion and caprice, and the 
calculus of the seeker for pleasure. 

We have now completed our brief and ten- 
tative analysis of the American order and of its 
more obvious corollaries for the American col- 
lege. The institutions that have been reviewed 
are those that the college not only must express 
but positively must help to fashion. Funda- 
mental methods have been suggested by which 
the American of the future may be prepared by 

173 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Ms college for this great task. Surely, the ideal 
before ns cannot now justly be accused of any 
fatal vagueness. Even as thus briefly defined, 
it is more definite than ^^scholarship/' ^* liberal 
culture/^ ^^ efficiency/^ or the other ideals in the 
interests of which college education ostensibly 
proceeds. As for vocational efficiency, the 
motive urged here pleads for itself as a cor- 
rective of a too narrow, albeit thoroughly 
definite ideal; and yet, would not exclude it. 
As for *^ education for citizenship,^^ it finds this 
ideal excellent ; but, taken just by itself, not only 
too indefinite, but tending to lay too much stress 
upon adaptation to institutions rather than to 
ideals; and, further, tending to isolate the po- 
litical institution, in particular, as the chief 
realm of obligation, instead of recognizing the 
social order as a whole. 

No, the American social order is not vague, 
nor are its educational implications vague. If 
an absolute and final delineation of that order 
be asked, — such is forever impossible and unde- 
sirable not only here, but for any sane educa- 
tional ideal. And now emerges an important 
truth. Moral progress is misconceived utterly 
if it is supposed that, before it can occur, men 

174 



THE LAEGEST TERMS OF CULTURE 

must be quite decided with respect to jnst what 
the ultimate and all-embracing goal of progress 
is, in the sense of being able to define it in every 
smallest detail. If this were the condition of 
moral progress, there never wonld be any moral 
progress. No, a significant part — the very soul 
— of moral progress is progress in the defini- 
tion of the goal of progress ! Part of our moral 
advance is advance in moral knowledge, as well 
as in the deeds that moral knowledge makes 
possible. "We set up what ideal we may, rarely 
too consciously or completely, and struggle 
toward that as a working hypothesis; well 
knowing that, since the complete ideal of man 
is rational, any ideal which he seriously and 
honestly follows will, just because it is incom- 
plete, lead to the larger and fuller ideal of which 
it is a rational part. Thus, if it be required that 
the American college shall be organized upon a 
complete consciousness of the perfect social 
order, it will never be organized at all ; or, it will 
be organized upon the basis of a treacherous 
dogmatism, which may very well lead to a 
tragi-comedy. But this does not mean that the 
American order does not and must not, to the 
degree of its self-consciousness, have a com- 

175 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

mon ideal. A society has this, or it is no so- 
ciety; for the fundamental unity that makes it 
a society — one society, however loosely one — ^is 
the common adoption, consciously or semi-con- 
sciously, of a common purpose. 

In the growing discovery of what this pur- 
pose means, the college has its priceless part. 
The one precondition is that the college shall 
fearlessly accept the purpose itself and struggle 
to fulfill it, 



xni 

HOW MAT THESE THINGS BE? 

We have attempted a voyage of discovery, 
which we hoped wonld cnhninate in what might 
be called a second discovery of America. We 
suspected that this discovery wonld mean the 
finding of the college of to-morrow. 

The corpus of America was discovered by Co- 
Inmbns long ago ; but who may discover its sonl? 
Not one man, snrely ! Nevertheless, every man 
who feels the importance of the obligation mnst 
do his best. We have seen how big is the task, 
— as are all tasks done critically in the service 
of a cautiously constructive idealism. Our re- 
sult is not likely to be all wrong. It is avowedly 
incomplete, and only the basis of educational 
elaboration ; but incompleteness and vagueness 
are not the same. Suggestions have been made 

177 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

concerning the edncational corollaries of such 
an America as has been defined ; but, in case this 
interpretation of America be considered nn- 
sound, mnch emphasis has been laid npon snch 
readjustments of college education as are in- 
volved in the mere acceptance of the American 
social order as a directing motive, however it 
be defined. 

Again, and yet again, it has been insisted that 
the main avenue of the college professor ^s ex- 
pression of his obligation to the social order is 
through his teaching of undergraduates. There 
is such a thing as creative research; there is 
also such a thing — ^in prospect — as creative 
teaching! The writer has gone so far as to 
suggest some specific changes in the matter and 
manner of our college curricula. At this point, 
it might be expected that he would propose a 
tolerably complete plan for the college curricula 
of the future, with an exact outline of the edu- 
cational function of each of the social and 
natural sciences. Certainly, he will make no 
attempt of this kind here ; first, for the reason 
that the proposed educational motive can be 
achieved in a variety of ways ; and, second, be- 
cause if great stress should be laid here upon 

178 



HOW MAT THESE THINGS BE? 

educational machinery, the real message of this 
1book might be missed and the letter substituted 
for the spirit. For the secret of the college of 
to-morrow will be a definite moral consciousness 
on the part of both teachers and students. In 
spite of the sentimental misuse of the notion, 
the personality and the intimate convictions of 
the teacher are paramount. Without these, all 
educational machinery utterly fails. This essay 
does not deal primarily with machinery. The 
machinery will take good care of itself. We 
academic minds, through long training, are 
quite facile in creating and repairing it ! 

Whatever the curricula of the future, or the 
instruments of its administration, the educa- 
tional program proposed here no doubt means 
more supervision of the student than at present 
prevails. If it be objected that it is presump- 
tuous to suppose that the educator can so surely 
know what the true purpose of education is that 
he can confidently impose it upon his students, 
one may answer that it is still more presump- 
tuous in him to assume that his students know. 
Somebody has to know. The educator has the 
first responsibility, and may as well accept it. 
Our social order recently went so far as a con- 

179 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

scription of lives, in the name of democracy. 
A conscription of part of the student's time, in 
the interests of a broad educational purpose, is 
not a fatal thing ; it may be done in the service 
of the same democracy. 

So much for the purely educational function 
of the undergraduate college. But it has a re- 
search function, as well; a function which 
should be jealously guarded. Here, as has been 
insisted upon, the academic mind, as such, how- 
ever ridiculed and belittled, finds a legitimate 
place for its valuable traits. Certainly, the 
graduate school of the college should not hesi- 
tate to train men for research. The teacher of 
undergraduates, too, should as certainly be en- 
couraged in productive thinking. But the mo- 
tives of college teaching and research should no 
longer be identified as they have been. Both 
have been assumed, as a matter of course, to be 
for the unique product roughly designated by 
the name of scholarship. This has been encour- 
aged by the growing tendency of college ad- 
ministrators to stress success in research as an 
almost sufficient qualification for success in 
teaching, and as a basis, for the promotion of 
teachers. There should be a sharp separation 

180 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE? 

between the function of research, on the one 
hand, and of teaching, on the other. This does 
not mean that the teacher shall not be a man 
of research, or the man of research a teacher. 
Whether research and teaching be done by dif- 
ferentiated groups of men, or by the same man, 
is largely a matter of practical emergency, of 
the nature of the field of knowledge under con- 
sideration, and of widely var^dng conditions 
that attend the development of imperfect in- 
stitutions under special circumstances con- 
stantly changing. 

But, not only in teaching, but even in research 
itself, there ought to be present, to some ex- 
tent, the obligation to the social order. One 
has an obligation to truth for truth's sake ; but, 
even in its search, the expert has an obligation 
to the world of concrete purposes. A more em- 
phatic recognition of this latter obligation, on 
the part of men of research, ought to be urged ; 
and, in doing so, we should recognize this mo- 
mentous fact, — that the search for truth in 
terms of concrete purposes reacts upon the con- 
ception of what truth really is, and lends to the 
academic truth-seeker a seldom used but indis- 
pensable test of the fact and meaning of all his 

181 



THE COLLEGE AND ' NEW AMERICA 

truth,— namely, its living place im iEe world of 
living valnes. 

The college of to-morrow and the new Amer- 
ica! How shall they enter into this genuine 
partnership, progress together^ each aiding the 
other to a full self -consciousness, and toward, 
the same demanding purposes? The desirabil- 
ity and some of the fundamental conditions of 
such a rapprochement have been stressed. But 
how may these things be? Can they be at all? 

No one is so visionary as to suppose that we 
can have ideal colleges in America, or any- 
where else; any more than we can have a per- 
fect social order. We are not looking for an 
ideal college in an ideal society. Our ideal is 
avowedly ambitious, as is any worthy educa- 
tional program. We must be content with ap- 
proximations to it It is not to be expected 
that such an exacting idealism will find its true 
import all at once. There will be a time of tran- 
sition, of course, — all times are such. It is even 
to be expected that, in the conflict of ideals, 
abortive and silly fads will gain temporary 
sway. But, out of the chaos, will come order; 
and a new reconciliation of all the ideals that 
now fight for exclusive mastery. 

182 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE» 

Yet, even eo, snch a program as ha3 been 
urged seems almost impossible of accomplisM- 
ment To make it effective involves not only a 
transformation of the aims and methods of col- 
lege edncation, bnt of the high school, from 
which most of our college yontha come, mM 
irreversible choices already made. To whom 
or to what shall we look for the accomplish- 
ment of the next logical stage in the develops 
ment of the American college? 

/Public opinion? Public opinion will help, as 
it already has helped tEe college to question 
its efficiency and to modify its standards, — ^al- 
though not always for the best< If the college 
is to think purposively, instead of academically^ 
the public opinion of America exerts a peiv 
vasive and irresistible influence in this very 
direction. For America is undoubtedly a nation 
of confirmed idealists. Furthermore, this 
idealism has already proved itself in crises, as 
being no merely materialistic idealism; but an 
idealism which, although ill defined, is of the 
same temper as that which should pervade the 
college, and which the college ultimately cannol 
withstand. But public opinion, although bring- 
ing to bear the pressure of a high utilitarianism 

183 



TfiE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

upon its institutions, cannot readjust the college 
efficiently, because it is not sufficiently inter- 
ested or informed and articulate enougK, to ef- 
feet definite and sure educational reforms. 

Governmental encouragement of the right 
sort would help. If the American social order 
and the college so vitally depend upon one an- 
other, the logic of the staters aggressive par- 
ticipation in education becomes apparent at 
once. Perhaps the federal government may 
well enlarge its educational responsibilities; 
and, in doing so, might be in a position to im- 
pose a broadly national vision upon higher edu- 
cation, as Plato thought the ideal republic 
should do. But governmental bureaus^ are, by 
their very nature, conservative, especially in a 
democracy; and, normally, government is 
slower than any other agency of the social order 
to inaugurate far-reaching reforms. 

Shall we look to the colleges themselves? 
What does one mean by that? Boards of 
trustees? They might do something. But, save 
in some sectarian colleges, boards of trustees 
interfere little, if at all, with the imposing of 
definite educational policies upon the college. 
It has even been considered as extremely im- 

184 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE! 

portant for academic freedom, that this be so. 
It is emphatically desirable that this contimie 
to be so. 

Perhaps our hope might well be placed in col- 
lege presidents and deans, — in spite of the fact 
that the modern college administrator tends to 
foe a servant of the established order, whatever 
his personal desires for reform; and is often, 
perforce, engrossed too mnch in business and 
administrative details which exclude to some 
extent the chance of purely educational leader- 
ship. Yet, here we have reason to expect much. 
For our college administrators have shown 
themselves interested in educational policy and 
progressive reform; and Have made themselves 
expert in educational issues, as have no other 
group of men, not excepting college professors 
themselves, who have grown accustomed to 
look to presidents and deans for sane educa- 
tional guidance. But, much as college adminis- 
trators have done for the progress of higher 
education — and to them we owe much of such 
progress — all that they could do by themselves 
could never accomplish the readjustment of the 
college to the social order in the ways sug- 
gested, even granted that they desired to do so. 

185 



[THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Our ultimate hope is not in public opinion, nor 
in governmental encouragement, nor in trus- 
tees, nor even in administrators. Our ultimate 
tope Is in the college professor himself. 

We started our inquiry with the college pro- 
fessor; our problem ends with the college pro- 
fessor; its solution is the college professor. 

The college is made or unmade by its teach- 
ers. The business of the college is education 
and researcE. It is the college teacher who does 
these things. He even writes the books he 
teaches. In all this, he has attained enough lib- 
erty to make him chiefly responsible for what 
the college shall become. 

Our appeal must be to the academic mind ii- 
self, fully conscious of its conservatism and in- 
ertia with regard to the larger issues of educa- 
tional policy. We must appeal to it, because it 
has the educational business of the coUege 
directly in its charge. Students are not edu- 
cated in administrative ofl&ces, but in the class- 
roonit The function of research is not done 
in the trustees' rooms, but in the laboratory. 
Administrators are keenly aware that no far- 
reaching educational reform can proceed with- 
cmt the earnest cooperation of the great corp^ 

186 



HOW MAT THESE THINGS BE? 

of college teachers. No such reform is likely 
to be permanently effective, miless it emerges 
directly from the aggressive convictions of the 
college professor himself. 

But a significant fact obtrudes. The majority 
of college teachers do not recognize their obli- 
gations to the social order at all. How shall 
they attain that imperative conscionsness, with- 
out which all genuine educational readjustment 
is simply impossible f 

There is only one way. Those who have al- 
ready attained such a consciousness must spread 
the contagion to those who have it not. Ad- 
ministrators have the machinery ready to hand 
in bodies already organized, snch as the various 
associations of colleges and nniversities. The 
professors have it at hand in the American As- 
sociation of University Professors, which has 
already achieved much for the American college 
and from which we may expect vastly more of 
a constractive natnre. Local gronps of teach- 
ers in almost every college are adapted to the 
efficient discussion of the new valnes in educa- 
tion. Even facnlty meetings may yet wake npl 
The problems are already in the air. All that 
needs to be done now is to attack them reso- 

187 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Intely with all the resources of our combined 
experience and insight, united with our desire 
for an American educational regime freed from 
traditions that are not pertinent, and adjusted 
to the urgent call of the new order. 

But all this involves a momentous thing — a 
well nigh Quixotic thing — the transformation of 
the academic mind. This transformation of the 
college teacher must reach back to his own train- 
ing. That he should, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, proceed as though the aim of all his 
teaching were the scholarly ideal is natural. 
If the truth were known, it is largely the result 
of the unique process through which he has 
gone to obtain his degree of Doctor of Philo- 
sophy, now demanded by most colleges of rank 
as a sufficient license to teach college subjects. 
Of course, some standard of proficiency has to 
be required; but what sort of mind does a 
Ph.D. training tend to create? What things 
does one do to be transformed from plain John 
Smith to John Smith, Ph.D.? 

He specializes in one subject; or, rather, in 
one special aspect of a special field of a special 
subject, for an average of at least three years. 
The center of his work is a thesis ; and the cen- 

188 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE? 

tral idea of this thesis is ^^ research^' of a sort 
that is supposed to reach a so-called ^^contribn- 
tion to knowledge/' So-called, for, really, one 
does not commonly create to order contributions 
to knowledge. And what kind of knowledge is 
it, such as it is ? Not a knowledge of the peda- 
gogy of his subject; or its educational or even 
logical relation to other subjects ; or its relation 
to the life outside academic purlieus, unless 
one's research be in certain of the applied 
sciences. No, the easiest way and the only way 
for the average man to create even an appear- 
ance of new knowledge is to go even more 
minutely into a minute aspect of a field already 
pretty well worked. So, the kind of knowledge 
he creates is, in the nature of the case, highly ab- 
stract, — carefully separated from every other 
field of learning, and subtly abstracted from 
every other subdivision of his own field. 

The writer has before him the pleasant bulk 
of a monograph of this kind, accepted by the 
faculty of one of our foremost universities. 
What admiration one must lavish, forsooth, 
upon the very form of this typically modem 
product of scholarship ! How deftly are exem- 
plified the canons that should prevail in all 

189 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

Boctors' theses, not written for the mere and 
sordid benefit of the race! Add to this that 
there are references to no less than one hundred 
and three authorities, by actual count. 

This contribution to knowledge bears a title 
which, like so many titles of learned mono- 
graphs, might seem trivial enough to the un- 
thinking rabble, whom, of course, we scholars 
can afford to i^ore. The title is, The Place 
of Phaseolus Vulgaris [Beans] among the 
Pythagoreans; a Study of the Esoteric Doc- 
trine, with Especial Emphasis upon its Bela- 
tion to Metempsychosis. The author quotes 
HegePs remark that ^^ several Pythagoreans, 
being pursued, preferred to die than to damage 
a field of beans/ ^ {Vid. Porphyry, lamblicus 
and Diogenes Laertius.) His immediate prob- 
lem is to solve the reason of this incredible 
respect for beans. He is much troubled, as well 
he might be. It is hard to see why one should 
respect beans, let alone die for them. Eespect 
is a strong word. Kant it was who pointed out 
that respect is reserved for Persons, not for 
mere Things. Is not a bean a Thing? The 
author of this thesis scouts the explanation of 
Diogenes Laertius that the Pythagoreans ab- 

190 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE? 

stained from beans not from respect, but 
because ^^snch abstinence made the visions 
whicli appear in one ^s sleep gentle and free from 
agitation. ' ' (Diog. Laert,, VlLL, 19.) This, onr 
anthor holds, is a doctrine strangely plausible, 

. and is the esoteric doctrine, to be sure ; bnt not 
the inner doctrine of the Master. He then pro- 
pounds the startling hj^pothesis which is the 
bold claim of this thesis as a credential to teach 
philosophy to undergraduates. But we f orbear* 
Thus it is that whether it be PJiaseolus VuL- 

^ gariSf or something else, minute scholarship and 

' research solely or chiefly earn, at last, the 
coveted degree that becomes the certificate of 
right to prepare the Americans of to-morrow to 
fight the battles of life. Is it any wonder that 
what has been the supreme value for the po- 
tential professor during those years that made 
him a teacher should continue to be the supreme 
value in his actual teaching? Would it not be 
a miracle if any other value found a regnant 
place? Only a larger mind and heart than even 
the high average possessed by college teachers 
could survive such a training without a sense 

. deadened to all but the glory of the academie,; 
So the new-fledged Doctor teaches as he has 

191 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

been taught ; the endless circle goes on, scholars 
teaching students as though they were material 
for future scholars, type producing type,— fail- 
ing egregiously with the undergraduate, but 
amply succeeding with the college teachers of 
to-morrow. Roundabout the cauldron go ; more 
and more emphasis upon research, more and 
more evaluating of the professor's academic 
standing in its terms, academic promotion and 
calls to better chairs in its name, until research 
becomes primary and teaching secondary, and 
the student's need sacrificed to the personal and 
professional ideals of the teacher and the glory 
of his Subject. 

Just what, in detail, is the best training for 
the college teacher is one of the next imperative 
problems. The intrenchment of time-honored 
traditions will render the solution slow and full 
of hazard. But what the transformation of the 
academic mind may mean is strikingly illus- 
trated by recent events. 

War is ever a marvelous shifter of emphasis 
and a purifier of values. And, during the World 
War, we saw academic minds gradually trans- 
formed, under the stress of public need. It 
was necessary that all the expert resources of 

192 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE? 

the nation shonld be ntilized to the limit of their 
power. The result was either the awareness by 
many of ns of how useless to the social order 
our special callings really were ; or, the inspira- 
tion to begin the active discharge of obligations 
to our country, through the knowledge of our 
respective specialties, in ways in which we never 
before dreamed to make them of worth. Psy- 
chologists found themselves serving armies in 
a technical way, or lecturing to soldiers on the 
practical psychology of war, or the psychology 
of command. Economists were called to appear 
before committees for expert opinion; or they 
were placed upon commissions to solve immedi- 
ate problems. Educational experts were sent 
over-seas to take care of the practical needs of 
the minds of the defenders of civilization. His- 
torians and political scientists were put to work 
on commissions preparing data for the peace 
conferences. Sociologists were induced to study 
races and social institutions, with a view to 
practical plans for social revision. Philos- 
ophers sought to interpret the philosophic 
meaning of the life of peoples, and the life- 
meaning of the philosophies of peoples, with a 
view of better understanding the war and the 

193 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMEEICA 

fntttre* And almost all the experts in these 
varions fields were asked to utilize their hereto- 
fore academic kaowledge in giving to pros- 
pective soldiers war-aims courses that should 
furnish the men in uniform a concrete thing of 
such stupendous meaning that they would be 
willing to fight for it and to die for it ! 

So far as the specialist was successful in all 
this, he abandoned his purely academic out- 
look for the purpose in hand. It did not and 
should not have meant that he forsook his aca- 
demic obligations. He merely kept them where 
they belonged. For the special purpose of serv- 
ing the social order, he found himself trans- 
formed from his habitual academic ways of 
seeing; things, and knew himself as a dweller 
in a unique world of truth. For this same spe- 
cial purpose, this same transformation must, 
here and now, be carried to its full completion, 
not only by the few whom the stress of war 
called, but by the many, who yet do not recog- 
nize world obligations. 

Let us see what this transformation meant 
and must contiaue to mean. We have already 
reviewed what sort of attributes the specialist 
needs in his academic obligations ; and we have 
devoted a chapter to defending them from carp- 

194 



HOW MAT THESE THINGS BE? 

ing critics. Now let ns see what kinds of traifs 
the specialist reqnires to serve the social order. 
It is jnst these traits that he wiU need as a 
teacher of the nndergradnate in this same ser- 
vice. 

If, in his academic field, he must be free from 
the distractions of the world, here he needs the 
virtue of worldliness. There, he reqnires inor- 
dinate cantion; here, the venturesome spirit; 
there, a judicial mindedness and a suspension 
of judgment ; here, accurate and quick decision. 
There, he serves truth alone; here, concrete 
human purposes. There, his medium is pure 
reason ; here, a high order of imagination also. 
There, his emotions would hinder ; here, he must 
have broad sympathies and common human feel- 
ings. There, he works with abstractions from 
life ; here, he works with life itself. There, he 
isolates his field from all others ; here, he relates 
it to all others. There, he is a scientist only; 
here, he is a man among men. There, he never 
intrudes his truth upon the world ; here, he in- 
sists upon it with the fire of sane enthusiasms. 
Here, he needs humor, an aggressive and sac- 
rificing sense of moral responsibility, the skill 
to convince with tongue and pen, the wisdom 

195 



THE COLLEGE AND NEW AMERICA 

to understand the meaning of Ms age, as well 
as the precise things the educator mnst do to 
shape it efficiently to the utter genius of its 
possibilities. 

The signs of the times are clear ; of one thing 
we may be absolutely sure. Inevitably, Amer- 
ican education will be refashioned upon some 
more or less utilitarian basis. The impending 
error is that this basis will be the thing nearest 
to hand, — ^vocationalism, or some of the stri- 
dent forms of materialistic efficiency. This is 
natural, because of Americans constant associa- 
tion of the utilitarian with the practical, the 
definite with the concrete, the material, the 
tangible, what appeals to the senses. We must 
save the American college from such second- 
rate purposes in a day when, nevertheless, the 
college must amply and promptly justify itself 
by some purpose. Let the college be practical, 
by all means; let it be efficient to the utmost; 
but let it be in the service of that practical 
idealism, of that idealistic efficiency, which we 
have shown to be the underlying genius of the 
American spirit at its best. There was once 
a Prussianized efficiency; we knew what that 
was and were sorry about it. There is such a 

196 



HOW MAY THESE THINGS BE? 

thing as an American efficiency, too ; let ns know 
what that is, and be glad for it! 

Through snch a transformation in the spirit 
of its ideals, through snch a vision of service to 
the American order and to the world, the college 
of the new America shall at last pnt all truth 
to its predestined test and service and prove the 
worth of the sacrifices that have been made for 
it in all ages. Only through snch a transforma- 
tion in education can the new America itself 
be lifted from a mere dream to a resolute fact 



INDEX 



Abstractions, tendency of 
educators toward, 12, 
13, 45-49; need of, 21- 
27; taught to stu- 
dents, 52-58, 66-67, 
92-93, 188-192. 

Academic mind, the, dis- 
trusted, 10 ; character- 
istics of, 10-19; de- 
fense of, 20-23; fail- 
ure of, 43-49 ; its atti- 
tude toward the social 
order, 45-49; gradu- 
ates tend to have it, 
49 ; transformation of, 
192-196. 

Administrators, college, 
185. 

Advisers, need of, 106- 
107. 

American, the, as an ideal, 
170-173. 

American Association of 
University Professors, 
104, 187. 

American life, the college 
and, 136-158. 

American Social Order, 
the, as a motive of 
education, 7, 71-82, 



19a 



136-176; defined, 118. 
135. 

Arts, the, and the college, 
93, 150-155. 

Capacities of men meas- 
ureless, 129-130; edu- 
cation in terms of, 
130. 

Citizenship, education for, 
123, 138, 174. 

CoUege, defined, 5. 

Conservatism of edu- 
cators, 17; defended, 
27-28. 

Continuity, lack of edu- 
cational, 64-65 ; how 
to be attained, 99-100, 

Correlation courses, 55-56, 
107, 167-169. 

Cosmopolitan clubs, 166. 

Culture, defined, 52; its 
larger implications, 
159-176. 

Curricula, typical, 51 ; 
looseness of, 58-61 ; re- 
vision of, 95-97, 100- 
102, 178^179. 

Democracy, American, de- 
fined, 118-135. 



INDEX 



Discipline, pedagogical, 
99. 

Doctor's Degree, training 
for, 61-62, 188-192. 

Economic order, the, and 
the college, 140-143. 

Education, defined, 77, 
110. 

Efficiency, false and true, 
88-90, 111, 196. 

Elective system, 56; fail- 
ure of, 59-61, 68; re- 
adjustment of, 97-98, 
179-180. 

English, the teaching of, 
54-55, 130, 168. 

Enthusiasms, lack of 
among college teach- 
ers, 17-18 ; lack of de- 
fended, 30-32. 

Equality, 128; education 
in terms of, 128-129. 

Facts vs, values, 84-85, 
110-111, 117, 158. 

Faculty meetings, 19, 103- 
104, 187. 

Freedom, 130-131; edu- 
cation in terms of, 
131-132 ; internation- 
al, 162-163. 

Gayley, Charles Mills, 
quoted, 68-69. 

Goethe, quoted, 92, 93. 

Graduate, college, char- 
acterized, 50-70. 



200 



Group systems, their de- 
fects, 56, 106. 

Ideals in education, their 
variety, 71-74. 

Imagination, lack of in 
education, 15-17, 61- 
62, 92-94, 154-155; 
dangers of, 28-30. 

Interchange of professors 
and students, 165. 

Interests, education 

through, 91-92, 108- 
110. 

International educational 
cooperation, 165-166. 

International order, the, 
and education, 160- 
167. 

Languages, the teaching 
of, 54-55, 99, 167. 

League of Nations, 164. 

Literalness of academic 
mind, 15-16 ; defended, 
28-30. 

Mastery, necessity in edu- 
cation, 98-99. 

Materialistic efficiency, 
danger of, 7, 88-90, 
196. 

Moral education, 90, Hi- 
ll?. 

Moral progress, its na- 
ture, 174-176. 



INDEX 



Organization, need of in 
education, 55, 60-61, 
107-108. 

Political order, the, and 
tli6 college, 136-140, 

'Pragmatism, 87-88. 

Pricelessness of men, 127 ; 
education in terms of, 
127-128. 

Professors, future of col- 
leges dependent upon, 
6, 186-188 ; their nar- 
row specialization, 12, 
188-192 ; their abstrac- 
tion from world, 12 ; 
pedantry and egotism 
of, 13-14 ; their humor, 
14; their tendency to 
abstractions, 14-15 ; 
their literalness, 15- 
16; their obstruction- 
ism, 17; their lack of 
enthusiasms, 17-18 ; 
speech of, 18; defense 
of, 20-23; how they 
educate, 50-70 ; crea- 
tive function of, 93- 
94 ; their research 
function, 180-182 ; 
transformation of, 192- 
196. 

Public opinion, molded 
by colleges, 3; in- 
fluence upon educa- 
tion, 183-184. 



Eationality of democ- 
racy, 133; education 
in terms of, 133-134. 

Eeconstruction, responsi- 
bility of colleges for, 
2-4 ; social rather than 
physical, 5; social 
sciences, and, 3-4, 41- 
42, 136-167. 

Religious education, 155- 
158. 

Research, function of, 21- 
22, 26, 180-182. 

Scholarship, as an educa- 
tional motive, 12, 56- 
58, 62-63, 68, 96, 102, 
180-182, 188-192. 

Science, natural, false 
impression of, 66-67, 
157-158. 

Social groups and the 
college, 143-150. 

Social nature of men, 
126 ; education in 
terms of, 126-127. 

Social order, the, obliga- 
tion of education to, 
34-42, 96-97, 181-182; 
obligation to not suf- 
ficiently recognized, 
44-45; academic atti- 
tude toward, 45-49. 
See also American So- 
cial Order. 



201 



INDEX 



Social sciences, and re- 
construction, 3-4; ab- 
stractness of in col- 
leges, 44-45, 52-54; 
their obligation to the 
American order, in de- 
tan, 136«167- 

Specialists, edncational, 
3-4; should cooperate, 
103-105. 

Specialization, character- 
istic of academic mind, 
11 ; defense of, 20-21^ 

State, the, and education, 
184. 

Student activities, 62-63, 
91-92. 

Student democracy, 127. 

Thomson, J. Arthur, 
quoted, 67, 

Truth, the educational 



fK>neeption of, 83-94, 
181.182. 

Values vs. facts, 84-85, 
110-111, 117, 15a 

Vocationalism, as an ef- 
fective ideal, 73-74; 
its deficiency, 74-75; 
how to supplement it, 
90, 174. 

War, the World, influence 
on education, 2, 81 ; on 
national conscious- 
ness, 116; on interna- 
tional consciousness, 
163; on college pr(>- 
fessors, 192-194. 

Webster, Daniel, quoted, 
76. 

West, Andrew Fleming, 
quoted, 69-70* 

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